


The World As It Appears To Be

by Benedict_SC



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, even the main characters only show up in like half the chapters, genyatta's in this but it's not the focus, it's hard to tag for this fic since almost everyone gets a scene or two, some pharmercy but i have weirder endgame lesbians in mind for mercy, there's a lot going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2018-09-18 20:37:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 44
Words: 132,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9402014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Benedict_SC/pseuds/Benedict_SC
Summary: Magic is real. Angela Ziegler has a messiah complex. Angela Ziegler is one of the most powerful people in the entire world. Her friend the talking moon gorilla is very worried about her. Let's, uh... let's see where that goes!





	1. Angel, Valkyrie, Witch, Devil...

**Author's Note:**

> There's a hell of a lot of technobabble and magic and fancy futuristic stuff going on in Overwatch. I want to really get into the weeds and try to make sense of it all, bump it up a place or two on the scale of sci-fi hardness. It's gonna involve science people doing science things, futurology, strong AI being a problem... I don't want to bill it as "rationalfic", but that's just sort of my natural wheelhouse, so apply the duck test if you want.
> 
> ALSO I love the hell out of all these characters and want to write them talking and doing stuff and I don't know maybe kissing if that comes up??? (e: Just, in general, not Winston and Mercy, that would- that would be weird.) And that is What Fanfic Is For so here goes nothing.
> 
> e 9/5/17: This is the fic formerly known as "Angel, Valkyrie, Witch, Devil...". I changed the name because it turned into way more of an ensemble thing than a Mercy-focused thing. Kind of late in the game to rename the thing, but it had to be done.
> 
> e 11/8/17: I should stick a disclaimer at the top here: I started writing this sometime after Sombra and before Orisa- so it ends up contradicting some lore stuff we've learned since then (particularly with Moira, who doesn't appear at all).

He'd seen two different things.

He'd seen her hit by Talon's firebomb, unable to defend herself. It had come in through the window, giving him only time to deploy his own barrier. He'd seen, through the energy field, her body torn apart by the blast, vaporized, annihilated. He wished he hadn't been wearing his glasses- maybe then he wouldn't have seen it in such crystal clarity as to leave no shred of hope alive.

She'd been killed, and there wasn't enough left of her to bring back home.

He'd also seen Angela carrying a charred, unrecognizable, but intact corpse out of the wreckage of the building. He'd seen her lay it out on the shell-shattered street, lift Caduceus to the sky, and deliver the familiar line in triumph. Golden light had burst out in ribbons, nearly blinding him and forcing Shimada to step back. The corpse had risen to its feet, and the light had faded.

And there had stood Hana Song. Cracking wise. Alive.

He hadn't paid close attention to what had happened afterwards. Lúcio had gone in for the hug, crying, Hana had laughed and slipped out of his grip, made fun of him for being worried... something like that. It hadn't affected the rest much. It was a relief, but being relieved had become routine. No one had really been worried that she would die. People like her never did, as Angela was so fond of reminding them.

No, the details of the scene escaped him. His thoughts were too occupied by a hundred competing fears, each with implications graver than the last.

Countless close calls, just like this one, he realized. Bombs, for sure. Dozens of them. So lucky, that they'd all had just enough concussive force to knock him out without doing lasting structural damage. A vat of molten iron, once. Several face-to-barrel encounters with Reaper's shotguns. Why _was_ Amel- Widowmaker so fond of mysteriously self-destructing tranquilizer rounds?

It struck him that he had to already have known. All those examples came too readily to mind. He'd thought about it, suspected it, laughed it off, made excuses, lied to himself. Dad would have scolded him for that kind of sloppy thinking. Science was about staring truth in the face.

The Caduceus didn't just stitch up flesh wounds. Her weapon built new heroes from scratch.

How many ape skeletons were scattered across the world?

* * *

Nobody thought he was being suspiciously quiet on the flight back to Gibraltar. Lena stopped by to check on him, saw he was lost in thought, and- this being perfectly normal for Winston- politely ran off without bothering him. Athena didn't seem to notice anything unusual either, and she was always the first to inquire about any descrepancies in his behavior. It almost suited him fine- but people weren't avoiding him because they knew he liked time to himself. They just avoided him because... well. Because of a lot of things. Some of them because they saw him as a stuffy old authority figure, certainly. Some of them because he was bad at carrying on a conversation. Some of them because they were afraid of the big huge ape. Some of them because he was a terrible scientist. Who _wouldn't_ avoid him?

He could point these things out to Lena, probably. She'd say that he was a great scientist, and a great conversationalist, and that he was only 29, come on, that's not old! Hang out with me and Genji sometime! She'd take every one of his doubts and just flat-out deny everything, which wouldn't help at _all._

Angela, he could talk to. She talked shop, which was always easy. He'd make mistakes, and she'd point them out, and point out why it was a perfectly reasonable mistake anyone could have made, and tell him how he could avoid those mistakes in the future. It would be very encouraging, if he ignored how _she_ never made any of those mistakes, but ignoring that was easy enough. She wasn't any good at small talk either, which ironically made it very easy to small talk with her.

But he couldn't talk to Angela about this. His head was swimming with every memory of anything she'd ever said to him about her work. Answers to probing questions, full of jargon he hadn't understood- and now he realized he hadn't been _meant_ to understand. He'd _pretend_ to understand, and she'd smile (knowing he was lying to her face) and change the subject, much to his relief.

How had she said the Caduceus worked? It was time to take inventory of the facts.

Nanomachines, of course. Whenever Genji heard the word he'd say "Nanomachines, son!" and then chuckle to himself. Hana would high-five him if she was present. He didn't get the joke.

But nanomachines weren't complicated. They weren't large enough to store intelligent computer programs- not enough silicon surface area to house so much as a microchip. They carried out a single task. Larger nanofactories manufactured and coordinated small nanobot teams, and those factories were coordinated by meta-factories, and so on up the ladder until the control device was reached. Caduceus.

According to Mercy, Caduceus didn't do much in the way of medical treatment. Its sole job, she claimed, was to scan tissues, and then fabricate and deploy the appropriate nanofactories. It usually only needed to send in two general categories of nanobot team. The first category was made up of injectors with two chemical payloads. One simple retrovirus that transformed dead cells into living stem cells, and one concentrated ATP supply to allow the new cell to divide rapidly. The other category comprised stabilizers- simple field generators that divided affected areas into tissue regions for the stem cells to fill without interfering with the growth of other tissues.

On top of that basic design, she'd built a number of magnetic nanopositioning systems into Caduceus to do more fine-grained work on specific problem areas, and safeguard against common problems and edge cases. Fixing wardrobe malfunctions, repairing omnics, and so on.

And if he wasn't a scientist, he might believe that that was enough to bring someone back from the dead.

It usually was, of course. A heart is easy to rebuild, she said- it's just a pump, a machine. Vital organs have specific jobs to do, and one intestine is about as good as another. If you know how to fix one body, you know how to fix them all.

A good chunk of the brain, according to Angela, was the same way- parts responsible for moving muscles and regulating organs and so on. Although the brain might seat the soul, that seat comprised only a small fraction of its mass- the rest could be rebuilt like any other organ. It wasn't any surprise that seemingly fatal head wounds could frequently be repaired.

That was what she said. But...

Hana Song hadn't lost an arm, or been shot in the head. She had been _blown away._ He'd seen it happen with his own eyes. Hana's body was _ash_... so the corpse Mercy had dragged out of the rubble...

That corpse had become D.Va. And it _was_ her, uniform and all. She'd spoken to him briefly after the mission, ribbing him for failing to shield her in time. She used a turn of phrase from a conversation they'd been in the middle of, making a joke about it. It _had_ to be her, not a body double or a clone or some other trick.

But the _corpse_ wasn't Hana's body. It was charred beyond recognition, but it _should_ have been charred beyond _retrieval._ Mercy had taken a _completely different corpse,_ and _turned it into D.Va_.

That should have been _impossible_ for the Caduceus Angela had described to him. She couldn't rejuvenate a body's cells into a _completely different person's cells_ , for one. But that wasn't even the half of it- Hana's _brain_ had been annihilated. Secretly hiding Hana's DNA and using it to convert tissue from a donor was one thing- sort of a sketchy one thing, but not the end of the world. DNA was tiny- small enough for every cell in a person's body to carry around redundant copies of the stuff. Mercy could easily have DNA samples for the whole team on her person at all times.

But Hana's _brain_ was back. Which meant...

Well, possibility number one was that everything he knew about naturalistic biology was a lie, and that rebuilding Hana's body from DNA somehow reclaimed her soul from the afterlife, or something. He filed that idea away somewhere in the back.

The more realistic possibility- which stretched the definition of the word "realistic", admittedly- was that Mercy had a complete brain state of every active Overwatch agent backed up. No, not only backed up- updated remotely in close to real time, judging by Hana's recollection of the instants prior to her death.

Which meant...

Well, the first thing it meant was that Angela had been lying to him for years. That stung. Just knowing that she could _do_ that to him... it cast their whole friendship in a different light. Still, it was understandable.

After all, the second thing it meant was that she was experimenting with illegal invasive nanotechnology on her own teammates, which isn't the sort of thing you tell someone just because they're your trusted friend.

The third thing it meant was that Angela's research was years ahead of where she claimed it was, and _decades_ ahead of anyone else's. She'd figured out how to scan brains in full resolution, transmit that data wirelessly, and use it to manually recreate a whole person from raw materials. That was beyond toying with stem cells and tissue differentiation- that required a kind of knowledge of the body that surpassed the whole of medical science. That required _mastery._

It meant that Dr. Angela Ziegler was the most powerful person on the entire planet.

And it meant that _he_ knew the most powerful person on the planet's deepest, darkest secret.

* * *

Mercy couldn't read his mind. He gave her a knowing look as they disembarked the dropship at Gibraltar, and she just looked confused and asked if he was feeling alright. Her nanobots either couldn't read his _thoughts_ in enough detail to convey them to her, or... perhaps they _could_ , and she refrained from using them that way? Either way, she didn't give any indication that she knew of his suspicions yet.

He didn't want to believe any of it.

That was a warning sign- Harold had said that _not wanting_ to believe something, in spite of the evidence, was the worst thing a scientist could do. _Wanting_ something to be true had _nothing_ to do with _searching_ for the truth- only with working to _change_ it.

The only recourse was to design an experiment.

"Athena?" he asked, after reaching his private workshop.

"Welcome back, Winston. Should I pull up the after-action report?"

"Later," he said. "Right now... do you remember where I put the aluminum foil?"

"In the cabinet below the bananas." In the cabinet below...

"Uh."

"The bananas are on a countertop in the back of the parts bay. On the other end from where you keep-"

"The peanut butter. Right. I knew that," he said. She was definitely judging him. Did she even know how hard it was? Did she even _have_ a New Year's resolution? Why did their computer need to be so _nosy?_

"What are you doing?" she asked, once Winston's head was wrapped in foil.

"Just testing a hypothesis, Athena."

The foil might not be enough. To pull off this experiment properly, he needed to completely insulate himself from all outgoing signals. That meant taking down the frog suit from the wall, and... squeezing... right... into... it, even though for some mysterious non-peanut-butter reason, it didn't fit as well as it used to.

Tinfoil hat, check. Frog suit, check. What else? He deployed his barrier generator- that would probably help. For good measure, he directed his Tesla cannon's output into the barrier's gaps, which would weaken the shield's integrity but improve its ability to scramble outgoing radiation.

"Winston? You should know- your vitals are failing to show up on my instruments. I am unable to monitor your safety during this experiment," Athena said.

That was a good sign- if Athena couldn't see inside, he was probably hidden from whatever instruments were recording the output of the brain nanobots. From Caduceus's perspective, it would look like he'd suddenly ceased brain activity- that he was dead. Mercy would notice immediately, and come running to resurrect him from whatever unfortunate lab accident he'd gotten himself into.

Three minutes passed before Athena piped up. "Winston, you haven't informed me of the parameters of your experiment. Is this expected behavior? Are you okay?"

An unwelcome side effect, he supposed, was that he might _also_ fool _other_ people into thinking he was dead.

"Please confirm. Winston! Please provide audio confirmation of your safety!"

He hesitated. Was that what he wanted to do? If Mercy was on her way, and Athena knew he was safe, would she inform her? Or- no, wait, Athena wasn't allowed to share-

"Please be aware that under Section 2 of the Overwatch Internal Emergency Response protocols, I am permitted to enable and share direct video recording of an agent's private quarters should I have reasonable cause to believe the agent's life is in danger. If I receive no response to the contrary-"

No, she couldn't tell anyone what was happening! The whole point of the experiment was to see if Mercy would notice something she shouldn't be able to know about!

"Athena! I'm fine! I'm just-"

There was a beeping at the door.

"Winston!" cried a familiar voice from outside, plunging his heart into his stomach. Hypothesis confirmed.

"...Let her in," he said, after a moment. He slumped over onto the floor, playing dead.

The door opened, and Angela Ziegler _flew_ into the room, propelled by the Valkyrie suit she apparently hadn't yet removed.

"Winston! No!"

Athena's speakers chirped to life. "Don't worry, Dr. Ziegler. He's fine."

Angela stopped in her tracks, lowering Caduceus. She looked around hesitantly.

Winston immediately flicked off the barrier generator and Tesla cannon, then removed both his tinfoil and frogsuit helmets.

"Angela," he said, "what brings you here?"

"I- you," she sputtered, "I thought you were..."

"You thought I was in danger? I assure you, there's nothing wrong. I was just conducting an experiment with my barrier here, is all." He began casually shelving his equipment.

"Oh," she said, looking relieved. "That's nice. What kind of-"

"In fact," he interrupted, "there's no reason at all you should have worried about me."

Her relieved expression disappeared. She took a step back towards the door. "That- that's nice. Sorry to have bothered you- I'll just show myself out-"

"Athena, though, she had a reason to worry. Did you see what I was working on? I was inside a sort of makeshift Faraday cage, which meant she couldn't tell whether I was alive or dead, with her usual sensors. Sorry about that, Athena."

"It's no problem, Winston," she replied.

Angela kept backing towards the door. "Yes- I see. That's-"

"I'm just wondering, Angela. What made _you_ think I might be in danger?"

She didn't have an answer. It looked like she was trying to think of something, but no excuse was reaching her tongue. Her eyes darted back and forth, refusing to make eye contact.

"I apologize, Winston," Athena said.

"What?" Angela and Winston asked in unison.

"I violated our privacy regulations, and notified Dr. Ziegler immediately, before asking for safety confirmation."

"You-"

"Ah, yes," Angela said, controlling her expression. "Athena informed me that you might be in danger, so I..."

"You came to check up on me," he finished.

"Indeed," she said, the look of relief returning.

So it would seem his test was inconclusive, then. It would seem he'd need to refine his experiment design in the future, to avoid false positives like this one.

Winston rubbed his head. "Athena, I expect you to follow our written regulations in the future. Dr. Ziegler has a lot of work to do, and a couple minutes of advance warning aren't worth distracting her with these sorts of false alarms."

"Understood," she replied.

"Well! I'll be off, then," Angela said. "Sorry about the disturbance!"

He didn't stop her from leaving.

"It would seem" being the key phrase. The test was _not_ inconclusive. So many parts of that brief conversation didn't add up. Athena didn't _break protocol-_ she was a computer. She wouldn't forget or ignore rules in the heat of the moment. And even if she could have... Angela was no actress. If Athena had warned her of the staged danger, she wouldn't have hesitated to answer. "Athena told me." That's all she needed to say. There would have been no reason for her to suspect her arrival was unusual, or that Athena's warning was violating protocol. She should have just assumed the standard protocol had already been carried out, and had a simple answer for his question.

And... she was his friend. If it had really been a mere misunderstanding, she would have taken the opportunity to sit and talk with him about their work. Unless she had pressing business to attend to... but no, if she did, she'd have told him what that pressing business was. She'd been in a hurry to leave, and sweep the whole incident under the rug.

He hadn't let her leave because he was convinced of her innocence- he'd let her leave because he had _no idea what to do_ now that she'd given herself away.

What would he have said? "You know what, Angela, I don't believe you! In fact, I know exactly why you came here, and it's because of this extremely dangerous secret that I know! I'm going to demand that you... stop doing that thing!"

More importantly, it wouldn't be _safe._ Telling someone you know their dark secret, in a sealed room with no witnesses? Angela wouldn't hurt him- but she could hide her secret some other way. If she had a backup of his brain, she might be capable of knocking him out, rolling back his memories, and claiming that his suspicious lab accident left him with amnesia!

Wait, no, there was one witness-

-Athena, he realized, his heart dropping from his stomach to somewhere yet deeper. She was working with Mercy to hide her secret. She'd been the one to come up with the lie about violating protocol. It wasn't just his friend- he couldn't trust the _omnipresent computer system that listened in on everything he ever said and coordinated Overwatch's operations._

"Houston, we have a problem," he said.

"I'm sorry?" Athena asked.

"Uh. Nothing."


	2. <Ꙩ> and the Meaning of Trust

"...so I say to him, 'Don't have anybody? Brother, I know that feel!'"

"You know that... oh! Of course. Splendid wordplay, my pupil."

Genji beamed. Or, it looked like he beamed. It was hard to figure out his facial expressions, with the metal mask he wore. That was something he had in common with the omnic. The two of them said more with body language and tone than the average human, Winston had noticed.

"However, I would guess that your brother was not so impressed by your cleverness. Was it really necessary to provoke him?"

"Er-"

"That sort of behavior is unlikely to heal the wound that has opened between you, you realize."

"I- I'm sorry, Master. I understand- I was trying, but-"

"Ha ha ha! No, I understand, my pupil. Your burn was much too sick. It forced its way from your lips, did it not?"

"Ahaha- er, no, Master, strictly speaking, I don't _have_ any, remember?"

Winston took the ensuing bout of digitized laughter as his cue to step out from behind the trees. At first it had seemed awkward to interrupt, but lingering any longer would have crossed the line into eavesdropping.

"Uh, Shimada-san? I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

He saw Shimada turn his head to look. The two were seated at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Watchpoint- cross-legged, doing some sort of pose. Yoga? Was it yoga? Their bodies weren't biological- did they even need exercise? He wasn't familiar with their cultural-

"See, Master? He calls me 'Shimada-san'! He is the only one with manners in this entire family!" Shimada chuckled.

 _Family._ It'd been so long since the Petras Act- so much scandal and mudslinging and dirty reality. He'd thought he was the only one who still thought of them as a _family,_ before he thought of them as a paramilitary organization.

"What brings you here, Winston-san?" Shimada asked.

"Uh, you'll have to excuse me- I don't believe we've been formally introduced yet. Mr. Tekharta, I assume?"

The omnic chuckled and rose to his feet. Or, no, he didn't. He remained sitting, and hovered in place- low-thrust repulsors? He'd heard the Nepal omnium worked with some interesting technology, but he hadn't had a chance to do any direct research. Perhaps-

"Please! Tekharta is my brother's... Tekharta is my brother's name. I am Zenyatta," he said, as if reciting an old joke.

"Mister Zenyatta," Genji laughed, "you see what I mean? So formal!"

"Peace, my pupil," Zenyatta said. "It is good to meet you, Winston. I owe you and Dr. Ziegler a debt of gratitude for saving my pupil's life."

"Ah- of course. I mean- think nothing of it. I didn't even- I'm not much for biology, I just assisted with the combat design..."

"You owe him a debt of gratitude for giving your pupil a cool air jump, and rad as hell hand shurikens," Genji said.

"Yes. Thank you for making my pupil 'rad as hell', Winston."

He didn't know what to say. This whole situation was embarrassing. These two clearly had some kind of close relationship- everything they said to him felt like they were _really_ saying it to each other, as part of some intimate verbal dance. Saying anything felt like he was stepping on toes. Which... granted, was how he _always_ felt, but... when it was humans, he could pretend he just didn't understand because he wasn't _human._ But Zenyatta was an omnic, and Shimada wasn't entirely human himself, which meant he only had himself to bl-

"Winston, relax! You look as if I were holding a gun to your head. I promise, you are not intruding," Genji said.

"O-oh. Uh, sorry."

"There is no need to apologize. What is it you came to talk about?"

"I, uh... I need your help with a situation."

"You are in luck," Zenyatta said. "My pupil is an expert in situations. You have come to the right place."

"It's, uh... it's a delicate situation. Involving internal Overwatch affairs. I'm not sure I should be discussing it in front of... uh..." Outsiders wasn't the right word. Or, it _was_ the right word, descriptively, but he didn't want to offend-

"Outsiders?" Zenyatta asked. "I have no intention of remaining an outsider for long, but I understand your need for privacy in this delicate matter. I will make my way down the hillside, and you may discuss your situation free of eavesdropping."

"There is no need for that!" Shimada said. "Winston, if I cannot trust Zenyatta-"

"My pupil, I will not allow you to believe our bond could be endangered by something so trivial. I am not entitled to this man's trust, and you must not demand he surrender it to me."

"Master, what happened to 'trust should be freely extended'?"

"I meant exactly what I said. Trust should be _freely_ extended, not demanded from others as tribute."

"I am not _demanding_ his trust! I am simply telling him you are trustworthy, and asking him to judge by his own trust in me!"

Zenyatta chuckled. "My pupil, you are not nearly so good a judge of character that he ought to defer to yours in place of his."

"Master, you are being cruel."

"In any event, he described the situation as 'delicate' and 'involving internal affairs'. I would not trust my _own_ security to anyone who would divulge such information on the pleading of one man."

"But-"

"It is not right for me to hear what he has to tell you. If after you have heard it, you believe I ought to know, you will ask his permission to tell me. If he denies it, you will keep the secret from me."

"Master, I've never-"

"Do you disagree with my assessment, my pupil?"

Shimada paused for a moment, thinking.

"...I do not. You have convinced me." He hung his head and made... some sort of hand sign? Presumably some kind of symbol of deference, or something. "Will you be on your way, then, Master?"

"Shortly. First..." Zenyatta gently clanked his head against Shimada's faceplate.

"Master!" Shimada said, sounding mortified for some reason. He buried his face in his hands as Zenyatta hovered his way down the hillside.

Winston stood there, unsure what to make of the argument(?) that just took place. He had a good few dozen seconds to think of what to say, while Zenyatta moved out of audible range, but again he was just frozen.

"...Well? What is this delicate situation, then?"

Winston paused. "I'm not sure how much I should say. The situation itself is dire enough that it's worth keeping quiet about until I have more information."

"And yet you believe I can help you with it?"

"Oh, I- I know exactly what it is I need you to do. It's not complicated, so you don't really need to, uh, know too much."

Shimada's face darkened. Literally darkened, the glowing visor dimmed. "We have spoken much about trust, just now. This must be a dire situation indeed if you do not feel you can trust me with it."

"I- yes! It is! Believe me, there's no one I'd trust more than you with this information."

"Oh? What about Tracer?"

He looked at Shimada and adjusted his glasses, frowning.

Genji stifled a laugh. "No, yes, you are right. Refraining from gossip is not among her many virtues. Me, though... what about Angela?"

"...Angela... Dr. Ziegler is, unfortunately, the subject of the dire situation at hand."

Shimada let out a low whistle, which wasn't something his synthesizer should have been natively capable of. He had to have installed it as a custom sound effect, specifically for these situations.

"So, uh. The whole thing is- it might not be that bad. It's possible I've misread the situation, and that there's an innocuous explanation for... the things I've observed. But I'm going to have to talk to her about it."

"That sounds reasonable, yes. But there is a reason you came to me first, yes?"

"Indeed. I, uh... I'm worried that if... if I reveal my suspicions to her, and they're correct... she may react badly. I can't confront her alone."

Shimada sat down. "React badly... you'd like me to accompany you, to calm her down?"

"Uh, no. When I say 'react badly', I mean... dangerously. I don't think you would be able to, uh... do much to stop her."

He played the whistle sound effect again. "You're worried that Angela might attack you? You really think that, after all you've been through together?"

"I... yes. The situation in question is _that_ serious."

"Hm."

Genji sat silently for a moment.

"You do not believe I would be able to do much to stop her? I am, in case you have forgotten, a cyborg ninja. In the very worst-case scenario, she is no match for me in combat."

"I... to get into, um, the details of- of why I'm worried about that, would start to get into some of the stuff I'm not sure I should tell you."

More silence. And then, "What exactly is it you want from me, then?"

"Well," he began, "it's simple. I'm going to go have a talk with her. And if, after that, I don't find you within three hours, and give you a codeword, I want you to assume my memories have been erased."

"Your memories?" Shimada asked. "That was not something I believed Angela could take from you. Should I assume you fear this for the same reason you fear I would not be able to best her in a fight?"

"That would be a safe assumption."

"And what am I to do if this comes to pass?"

Winston took a handheld device from a pocket. "This contains a recording of a message to myself. You should give this to me, and have me listen to it. I should know what to do from there."

Shimada took the recorder and looked it over. "Something troubles me, Winston."

"Hm?"

"The task you have laid out for me is indeed simple. I am to wait some amount of time, and if I fail to receive a message, I am to relay this information to you. It seems like this is... a waste of my talents, yes?"

"Uh..."

"That was a joke. Almost. But it raises a question, does it not? This is a task Athena could carry out for you, and yet you sought me out at the top of a cliff. Why is this?"

Winston let out a deep breath. "I have... reason to believe that Athena has been compromised. She appears to be working with Dr. Ziegler to protect her secrets."

Shimada looked around. "And so you came to me, up here, because I do my daily meditation out of doors- and out of the range of her hearing."

"That's right. And... the other thing I want you to do, if I don't give you the all clear, is to initiate an emergency shutdown of the Athena systems at Gibraltar."

"Er- how does one-"

"I've included the appropriate passwords in the audio recording."

Shimada appeared to be lost in thought. If it were him, he'd be wondering if _he_ were the dangerous element. Discussing a scheme out of earshot of Gibraltar's security systems was suspicious in and of itself- any potential traitor would want to come up with an excuse not to be overheard. If fact, the more he thought about it, the more suspicious his own behavior was looking. How was he going to convince Shimada to-

"Alright, then. I have your back, Winston," Genji said.

Oh. He... trusted him. That made things easier.

* * *

I saw a pair of lovers walking through the park, singing. They broke into a sprint, racing each other to a large tree. They kept singing the whole while, increasing in volume as they ran, until they ran out of breath. They collapsed onto the grass and laughed and laughed and embraced each other. It was a happy story.

I saw a man in a suit walking to work. He kept walking to work. He arrived at work. It was a boring story.

I saw a bloodied child finding a crowbar in the darkness. He shoved it into the gap between the wall and the hinge of the door keeping him trapped. He pulled and pulled and broke his arm and kept pulling until it popped off, and he went outside. And then the man keeping him trapped found him and beat him and killed him. It was a sad story.

I saw someone in a suit walking to work. She kept walking to work. She arrived at work and realized she forgot her ID card and had to buzz in, and then went inside. It was a boring story.

I saw another person in a suit who walked to work and arrived there uneventfully. It was a boring story.

I saw a number of people firing weapons at robotic people, and being fired upon in return, in the snow. There was a lot of jumping between cover and dodging weapons. Some of them died, and others survived, and everyone was very afraid. It was an exciting story, and also a sad story.

Later I saw more people firing weapons. One of them was shot, and began bleeding. Because of his wound, he collapsed, and was about to die. A robot nearby threw a glowing ball at him, but it didn't do anything. It was a sad story- but- but- it should have been a happy story. Should? Of course. It should have been a happy story. The man's wound closed up, and he escaped. It was a happy story.

Later I saw two friends playing video games together. They made some crude jokes about anatomy. It was a funny story.

Later I saw a large robotic person walking through a city. Using their large hand, they destroyed a building. Other people were shooting at them, because they didn't want them to destroy buildings. The robot from an earlier story threw a glowing ball at the large robot, but it didn't do anything. It was a tense and exciting story, but- but? It should have been a different kind of story. It would be a better story if it were boring, and a little bit sad, and a little bit happy, because the bullets pierced the weaknesses in the large robot's armor and caused it to collapse and stop destroying buildings. The large robot collapsed. It was a bittersweet but somewhat boring story.

Later, I saw the robot from earlier sitting on a hill overlooking an ocean and a large building. He was sitting on the ground. He should have been floating a little bit in the air, even though his thrusters weren't quite enough to hold him there. That would be a better story. He floated a little bit in the air.

Sitting next to him was a person who wasn't a robot _or_ a human. Or perhaps he was both? The person, who had been quiet, spoke.

"Master, the dragon is at war within me."

The robot turned his head. "Oh?"

"What I heard from Winston has me feeling... conflicted."

"Is that so? It's a good thing you have so much experience with such emotions."

The cyborg chuckled. "True, Master. Yet familiarity breeds no comfort with the feeling."

"Have you decided whether to share Winston's news with me?"

"I..." the cyborg stopped. "I forgot to ask his permission, actually."

"My question stands."

"Have I decided whether to share it with you?"

"Indeed."

"...We just spoke about this, did we not? His trust is not mine to demand, nor to steal."

"I see," the robot said, remaining motionless.

"Did you... want me to tell you anyway?"

"Do I? That's an interesting question. Why do you ask it?"

"Er..."

"I worry that you asked it because, depending on my answer, you intended to change your decision not to share Winston's secrets with me."

"No! No, Master! I- it confused me that you brought us down this line of questioning. It seemed to me as if you meant to convince me to tell you, in spite of the principles we had agreed upon."

"...Ah."

I heard an awkward silence.

The robot spoke. "I could say I meant to test you, but you passed my test when you affirmed that his trust was not yours to steal. I should have said as much, rather than let the silence linger and let you believe that the test had not concluded."

"...Oh."

"I apologize for my error, in the sense that I subjected you to an erroneous accusation."

"Ah. Thank you, Master."

"Be not misled, however: I reserve the right to use cryptic silences to mess with you."

The two of them laughed, and a less awkward silence persisted as the two meditated by the cliffside.

The cyborg spoke again. "While my honor and my conscience keep me from giving you the details, I would appreciate counsel with regard to... the emotional core of the perdicament I find myself in."

"Oh?"

"A member of our team has been accused of something terrible. I have known them a long time, and while I trust them deeply, I cannot truly say they would never do what they have been accused of doing."

"There are many kinds of trust, my pupil. You may trust someone to have the best of intentions, but not trust them to pursue their aims with wisdom."

"That may be, Master, but this person I trust in every way I can imagine. I do not know what could motivate them to do the evil of which they stand accused, but I believe they most likely have a good reason."

"And yet you have agreed to work against them?"

"..."

"You trust this person in every way you can imagine, you say. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination, then? What dimension of trust do you suppose is missing between you, if you are honest with yourself?"

I heard another silence- this one tense, but contemplative.

"I suppose... I do not trust them to put their full trust in us."

"Oh?"

"Whatever their good reason is, they have kept it a secret from Winston and myself. They must believe their actions are in our best interests... but that we are too short-sighted to agree."

"Historically, not a stance held by many people who were truly acting in anyone's best interests."

"I... they..."

I heard an anguished silence, this time.

"Ah. I believe we have hit upon the source of your inner turmoil, my pupil."

"What?"

"Your soul is in opposition to itself, because it is plagued by doubt. There is a question you do not know the answer to, and your current course of action has bound you to an answer you are unsure of in your heart."

"What question is this, Master?"

"You trust this person deeply enough that you believe they might be right. You think perhaps they are wiser than you, and are truly protecting you from your own foolishness."

"...Perhaps."

"Yes, perhaps. But perhaps instead they are wrong- perhaps they think themselves wise, but refrain from putting their trust in you because it would mean doing the hardest thing it is possible for a person to do."

"Master, I have counted at least seven hardest things it is possible for a person to do, according to your teachings."

"...Is that so? I will be more specific, then," the robot said. "By trusting you, and potentially being swerved from their course of action, they would have to change their mind. To _change one's mind_ is the hardest thing it is possible for a person to do."

"Aaaaand that makes eight."

"Ah. Perhaps I am overfond of that particular framing..."

The two began laughing, and their conversation turned to other things. I had spent long enough evaluating the story. It was not quite a happy story, nor a peaceful one. I settled for calling it an important story.

I saw a girl being shouted at by her mother about her grades. She called her terrible names and threw things at her, and tears flowed from the girl's eyes. The mother stomped over to the girl's toybox and retrieved a doll. The girl panicked, and begged "please", sobbing, but the mother ignored her and threw the doll into the fire, where melted bits of other toys sat. It was a sad story.

I saw someone in a bed, with a young man sitting at the foot of the bed, crying. A wire connected the person in the bed to a heart rate monitor, which beeped. I heard it beep slower and slower until a flat tone rang out, and a doctor escorted the crying young man out of the room. It was a sad story.

I saw a man in a suit getting on the train to go to work. He made it to work on time...


	3. Imagined Enemy is Not

Winston put one finger on the console outside Dr. Ziegler's office.

"Angela?"

Some thumps resounded from within. The sound of rollers indicated a drawer being closed. She was putting something away.

"Ah... come in!"

The doors snapped open, revealing a workshop much like his own. The same layout, actually, save for large windows along one wall. Earth's staggeringly blue sky filled the view, bathing the room in natural light from the sun, barely peeking over the cliffs. The Valkyrie suit hung from a suspension cable in the center of the room, and Caduceus sat disassembled on a workbench.

"Hello, Winston. What brings you here? Has something come up in your research?"

She'd walked up to the door to greet him, which wasn't her usual habit. She tended to stay seated at her workbench, inviting him to take a chair and sit down. He wasn't sure what that meant.

"In my research? Uh... in a manner of speaking. I'd actually like to discuss the mission, if that's all right."

Angela seemed relieved, standing down and taking a seat. As far as she knew, the only reason he had to suspect her was her appearance during his experiment. She didn't know that he'd been present when Hana was obliterated. She wasn't expecting her Resurrect ability to come under scrutiny.

Should he hide what he knew? Should he use the leverage he had to get her to...

Well, that wasn't a useful line of thinking, actually. He didn't _want_ anything from her but the truth. There was no reason to be manipulative, now that he had Shimada acting as insurance.

"The mission, then. Is there something you feel we could have done better?"

Winston shook his head. "No, not at all. In fact, everything went much better than expected," he said. "It was pretty touch-and-go during Talon's bombing, but you were able to nullify all casualties we sustained."

Angela grinned. "Heroes never die, Winston. I don't know how many times I have to tell you."

"Ha ha! Uh, yes. You keep on exceeding everyone's expectations."

"Perhaps you should set them higher, then."

"..."

"Is something wrong?"

"Something's bothering me about what happened when that building collapsed."

"Hm?"

"You know, I was in that building when the bombing took place?"

"Ah, yes. I saw you leaping out just as it began to crumble. I'm glad you were unharmed."

"Thank you. But... that was also the building you found Ms. Song's body in, correct?"

Angela went quiet for a moment. "Yes," she said eventually, "It was a lucky thing. If she'd been buried deeper in the rubble, I may not have been able to get to her in time."

Winston nodded. "Very lucky, yes."

There was a pregnant pause.

"Angela, I was present in the room where the major firebomb went off. My barrier projector held out exactly long enough to weather the blast."

"Excellent! You've been making great strides with your work, Winston."

He laughed sheepishly. "Thank you, Angela, but that wasn't quite why I brought that up."

"Oh?"

Deep breath. "I wasn't alone in the room when the bomb went off. Ms. Song was there with me."

Angela gasped. "Oh, Winston! I'm so sorry! That must have been hard to-" a hitch in her breathing- "...watch."

Winston nodded.

"You... saw..."

"The bomb struck her directly in the back and detonated. She was too far away for my barrier projector to shield her. She was... blown to, uh, smithereens."

Angela tensed, but didn't respond.

"It's okay, Angela. You revived her. Everything's fine now."

The tension failed to leave her, and she wasn't saying anything.

"Angela... I can see why you're upset. You've been keeping something secret for a long time, but I'm not angry. We can talk about this."

Her eyes turned cold. "Secret? What do you think I'm keeping secret?"

"That wasn't Hana Song's body you revived today."

She broke eye contact.

"It's okay. I just want to know-"

"Athena, put him under."

What?! No, wait, she couldn't- "NO! You don't want to do that-" and then ------ ---- --- ---- --- --n---n- m-nd -ent blank.

* * *

 I wasn't sure. What kind of story was this? Was it even over?

* * *

He came to, his head spinning. The light of the sun, barely peeking over the cliffs, blinded him. How long had he been out? Had Angela wiped his-

Well, no, wait. Of course she hadn't, because he remembered being concerned that she might wipe his memory. And the sun- the sun was in the same place, so when he'd objected-

"Why don't I want to do that?" Mercy asked, her voice carefully controlled.

"What?"

"You said I didn't want to do that. I'm sorry- why did you say that?"

She'd woken him up immediately. He breathed a sigh of relief. "I'm not stupid, Angela. I wouldn't come here if I didn't have a way to protect myself."

"What way?" she demanded.

"A deadman's switch, of sorts. If you... kill me-"

"Winston, I would never- what?! Trust me, I'm not-"

"If you kill me, or _erase my memory,_ then some sensitive information is going to find its way into the hands of the team- and then the general public."

Mercy drew in a sharp breath. "You can't! You don't have any idea what you're doing!"

"That's right. I _don't_ have any idea what I'm doing, Angela. That's why you have to _tell_ me."

Mercy... buried her face in her hands and turned away, shuddering and sobbing. Defensiveness and aggression he was prepared for, but not... this.

"Angela, please. Let's do what I came here to do, and have a civil discussion as colleagues."

She responded with an anguished groan.

"Angela, I _trust_ you. If you're think you're doing something for the greater good, I _believe_ you. Let's just _talk_ about this!"

"You won't."

Huh?

"You won't believe me. I've- well. Not you, I haven't- not with you," she said. She walked over to the window and braced herself against the glass. "They all decide I've lost my mind. I've gone too far."

"Angela-"

"Wilhelm thought so. Ana, Torbjorn, Jack. Gabriel, especially. Even _Genji._ "

This... wasn't the first time she'd been discovered. How many minds had she tampered with?

Mercy turned around and glared at him. "I don't want to go through this again, Winston. I can't stand the thought of looking into your eyes and _knowing_ you'd stand against me, if you still knew."

"I-"

"Just let me have you, still! Let me keep having _one_ real friend! Just- damn you!"

He didn't know what to say, so he stood up and walked over to the couch where he'd been too nervous to sit earlier. He sat down, and it was built solidly enough not to creak under his weight.

"But you can't! You can't let me have that! You- you went out of your way to make it impossible! Your- your deadman's switch! Why?!"

He didn't say anything. He wanted to say "don't worry", or "of course I won't think you've lost your mind". But... Reinhardt, Ana, Torbjorn, Jack... those weren't people whose opinion could be discounted lightly. He didn't know what it was she thought would scare him.

Instead, he gestured at the chair.

She stared, and then walked over and sat down. She didn't say anything else- just buried her face in her hands again.

"If it's worth anything, I'm sorry for putting you in this position."

"You can still go," Mercy said. "You could just... stop asking questions, and turn off your deadman switch, and leave. Forget this happened."

He sighed. "No, I can't."

She nodded. "Of course."

A silence.

"So let's get it over with," Mercy said. "How much do you know?"

"Your Caduceus can resurrect us from, uh... raw materials. It doesn't have to be our own corpse, like the situation with Hana today."

She nodded.

"Which means... well, that your research is a lot further along than you've said. It's beyond just stem cells and ATP- you're doing a lot manually."

Another nod. "The old design still handles most of the patching-up, when I'm working on smaller wounds, but... yes."

"You've got our brains backed up, somehow. You need to, to bring us back if we're completely beyond normal healing. If we find out, you can use our current brains as raw materials to make a copy of the backup, at a point in time where it hadn't discovered anything you were doing."

Mercy paused to take a deep breath before nodding again. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It almost goes without saying, but you're monitoring us in a lot more detail than is entirely compliant with Overwatch privacy regulations."

She nodded. "That was what your 'experiment' was about, then? Seeing if I'd notice your life signs disappearing?"

"That's right. I didn't call you out at the time, because..."

"Because you needed to prepare your deadman's switch. Right."

He nodded. "Which reminds me: Athena..."

Athena had probably been hoping she wouldn't get dragged into this, but the chirp of her audio prompt sounded anyway. "Yes?"

"Thank you for giving me a plausible out, there. I know you wouldn't make a mistake and violate privacy regulations by accident, but it was a good excuse not to press the issue then and there. I appreciate the assist."

"Y-" there was a hiccup in the audio, as Athena processed his statement. "...You're welcome, Winston. I'm glad to be of service. And-"

Mercy was facepalming again. "I apologize, Dr. Ziegler. I wasn't thinking strategically," Athena said.

"So that's another thing," Winston said, "as I've just confirmed. You've somehow coerced Athena into helping you hide these secrets. And-" he remembered what Mercy had said before he lost consciousness- "you've put her in control of some of these systems, it looks like."

"Not coerced," Athena said.

"Convinced," Mercy said.

Huh. That was something he'd have to ask about later.

"And... you're not denying any of this?"

"I have no lies to tell you. Erasing memories... _usually_ removes the need for an elaborate web of deception."

Winston nodded, and looked her in the eyes. She immediately broke eye contact and stared at the ground to her left.

"So now I need to know _why,_ " he said.

"Isn't that enough?" she asked. "I want to keep you alive! I've broken the rules and violated everyone's privacy and kept lifesaving technology hidden, to keep you all alive. What more do you want?!"

Winston looked her in the eye again, and this time she didn't budge.

"You're not telling me everything."

"You know enough! It's all true! Do what you have to do, now!"

"You haven't explained why they- why Reinhardt and Amari and so on- thought you'd lost your mind."

"They- because- just, because of this! That's enough!"

Winston shook his head. "Maybe. Jack, sure. But I knew Ana Amari as well as you did, Angela. She would do _anything_ to keep this family safe. If she'd known what I know- that'd you'd broken a few rules to protect us? She'd have been behind you one hundred percent. So... there's more."

She fell silent.

"Angela?"

"...not God," she whispered.

"I'm sorry?"

"It's what they all said to me. Every time I told them about my dream," she said, her eyes watering.

"Sorry, what did they say?"

"They... 'Angela, you're not God.' All of them."

"You're not- well, sure, but... they're not talking about Resurrect, are they? Reinhardt's had to come back dozens of times."

Mercy glared at him. "No. Not just that. If it's just to make sure _heroes_ never die, they'll find excuses. It's fine if _we_ make it through every battle." Tears were streaming down her face.

She was talking about...?

"I have to put an end to _death itself,_ Winston."


	4. WE INTERRUPT THIS BROADCAST

"An end to _death?_ "

* * *

 

WAIT, hold that thought! We've got a breaking report from **A Moment in Crime** , coming to you _live_ , from the shining omnic paradise of Adelaide, Australia! We're taking you now to the scene of the incident as it unfolds!

It looks like what we're seeing here is- yes, it is, it's one of the terrorists that's been making headlines lately! He's standing atop what looks to be forty tons of dynamite, folks, and by the looks of things he couldn't _be_ more excited!

Zoom in, get a good angle! Who is that? That's right, it's-

JAMISON FAWKES  
Alias: **JUNKRAT**  
Bounty: 25,000,000 USD  
_Probably a really serious **CRIME-DOER**_  
**VOLATILE** and dangerous

That bargeful of dynamite is in motion, folks! It's suspended from a crane perched atop the wreckage of Westpac House's top floor! No one knows how it got there, but-

Wait, no, we're getting reports from the ground! It seems the crane itself was propelled up to the top floor by one of the blasts that rocked the city earlier! It sounds like one of the blasts that rocked the city earlier was the precisely aimed demolition of a nearby construction site!

Omnic security forces are on the scene, in hot pursuit of a figure seen fleeing the site of the demolition! Is that... yes! We have a visual on-

MAKO RUTLEDGE  
Alias: **ROADHOG**  
Bounty: 25,000,000 USD  
_Definitely a really serious **MURDER-GUY**_  
**ARMED** and dangerous

His chopper- which is to say, his hog- his motorbike- is outpacing the security fleets! It looks like he's headed for the nearby Vishkar development, which is...

Hold on, we're getting more reports from our professionals in the field! The crane's in motion, and so is its explosive payload! It's swinging towards the same target Roadhog is fleeing towards! It looks like these two deranged junkers are planning something!

The target of the terrorist action is roughly twenty acres of new construction commissioned by the South Australian branch of the Omnic Displacement Amelioration Association. ODAA has met with considerable success resettling omnics who were displaced from their Outback homes, following the so-called "Australian Liberation Front"'s destruction of the Australian omnium. Their latest project is in collaboration with the Vishkar Corporation, who are taking the resettlement crisis as an opportunity to breathe new life into their hard-light housing initiatives following their PR fiasco in Rio de Janeiro.

Vishkar's stock has ballooned since- hold that, we've got a new development on the scene! The payload has _detached_ from the crane, and is plummeting towards the main hard-light Vishkar tower!

...Scratch that, the payload has _stopped!_ It's been grabbed and suspended in the sky above the Vishkar development by what looks like a _hand-_ let's go _live_ to the scene of the attack, where Vishkar representatives have stalled the attack for now!

"Fractalix, reposition the photon source! The trajectory is unstable!"

"I'm trying, ma'am! Our people are reporting interference!"

"Then they shift the frequency! We can recalibrate later, but right now we can't allow this bomb to reach the EM coolant coils!"

"Not signal interference, ma'am! They're shouting about human interference!"

"Human interference?"

Breaking news! Let's take you a block down the road, where _Roadhog_ has made his way past Vishkar's perimeter! He's tearing through their junior architechs like tissue paper! That hook of his is some _nasty_ business!

But what's this? A section of the wall has blinked out of existence, and behind it... a forest of sentry turrets! Roadhog is being blasted full-force by a half-dozen industrial-strength lasers! He's forced to retreat around a corner!

"RRRRRRRRrrRRGH"

And who's that stepping on to the scene? It looks like one of Vishkar's senior field architechs...

SATYA VASWANI  
Alias: **SYMMETRA**  
Bounty: $0 USD   
_Not technically a **CRIMINAL**_  
**WE JUST WANTED** to give her a cool title card

"You have taken the lives of my people, and so forfeited yours."

"THEY... STOLE... OUR _HOMES"_

"It sounds like you expect me to pay attention to the words coming out of your mouth."

"THEY... LOSE _THEIRS"_

"It's not a reasonable expectation, you realize."

"AND _YOU_... REBUILD FOR _THEM"_

"I'm sorry, we're talking past each other. Perhaps I should simplify my language. How does 'die, monster' sound to you?"

It looks like she's going in for the kill, but- what's this? The building is rocked by a sudden explosion!

Yes, it looks like Junkrat has loosed a portion of the dynamite payload, and used it to destroy the hard-light hand keeping the rest of it suspended above the construction site! Vishkar architechs are scrambling to bring his aerial assault to another halt!

Roadhog's no stranger to sudden explosions, which means he looks to be taking the upper hand in the fight! He's letting his hook fly, and... that's a direct hit! He's got Symmetra by the arm!

...And _only_ by the arm! It looks like he's reeled in her prosthetic, which she appears to have _detached!_ Symmetra herself is on the retreat, heading to back up the architech command center! He looks happy with his prize, right up until- bang! Was her prosthetic _itself_ a hard-light construct? Either way, Roadhog doesn't look quite so happy with his new collection of laser burns!

"GRRrRRRGhhh... YOu'd better huRRY UP, JAMISON"

Let's take you now to the on-site command center for Vishkar's Adelaide development! Symmetra's arrived on the scene, and she's patching through to Vishkar's HQ! Let's listen in.

"Sanjay, this situation is a _disaster._ We need operations support from the planning center."

"..."

"I don't understand. You keep talking about the risks- can you not silence anyone who breaks contract?"

"..."

Oh- apologies, ladies and gentlemen! It looks like we can't get a wire on Vishkar's secure communications! Let's keep listening and see if Symmetra's end of the conversation is enlightening!

"This isn't a maybe. The damage is already done! Our assets are immaterial- it's our failure to provide _security_ that's ruining our chance at this contract!"

"..."

"What other operation could _possibly_ be a more urgent use of the planning center's time?"

"..."

"That's hypothetical! _This_ is _real!_ I've watched my subordinates _die_ , Sanjay!"

"..."

"What?"

"..."

"No! That's not-"

"..."

"That's- no! How could they come to a decision like that in _eighteen seconds?_ "

"..."

"They couldn't possibly have predicted this! What are you _talking_ about?"

"..."

"You can't be implying-"

"..."

"You- people have _died!"_

"..."

"It's not perfect. I _know_ perfect. Perfect is my business, Sanjay."

"..."

"It _sounds_ like you're setting me up to fail."

"..."

"We'll have to see, then."

She's hanging up the phone! We're not sure what to make of that half of the conversation, but it _sounds_ like they won't be getting any help from this "planning center"!

"Tessera, I have word from our superiors."

"Hm? Symmetra? Do we have new orders?"

"More or less. We're to allow the junkers to demolish our existing groundwork, and rebuild immediately. Our superiors believe that demonstrating our ability to bounce back from destruction is a greater value-add than demonstrating our construction crew's ability to repel terrorist attacks."

"Wh- but we've still got people in there!"

"We'll hold the criminal element back long enough to evacuate our remaining personnel. Keep putting obstacles in that maniac's way."

That's enough hanging around with the good guys- let's take you live to the scene of Junkrat's attempt to get what's left of his payload to the ground!

Get a wide shot, here- another hard-light arm has seized the explosive payload, and he's loosing more dynamite to escape! This time, it looks like he's giving it all a longer fuse- and dropping it at the hand's base! WHOA, now- check the levels on the audio there, did we pick that up? Our mics are still in action? That was a hell of a blast! The hand's broken off at the arm, and- yes, it looks like Junkrat's payload has reached the roof of Vishkar's new city center in progress! Can ANYONE stop this madman?!

...Apparently not! The building's been torn apart by the blast, and Junkrat's nowhere to be- hold that thought, no, he's somewhere to be seen. That's him careening through the air, looking at a twenty-story drop! Is this the end of Jamison Fawkes?

He's dropped out of sight, but we're receiving reports... he's been snagged out of the air by a hook! Let's go _live_ to the scene of the unlikely rescue!

"Bargain, Roadhog! You made a good head-turner for those suits, that's for sure!"

"..."

"Nehhhh, that ain't it. It was sheer cunning, that's what! They never saw it coming! So much for putting up bots in their ritzy new flats!"

"..."

"Come off it, what? You're having a laugh!"

"..."

That's not communications security you're hearing, like before- Roadhog just isn't saying anything! Junkrat seems to understand just fine, though- what kind of bond have these menaces to society formed?

The two of them are having a look at the site of the blast, where... hold on, now! What site of the blast? The building's just _gone!_

...We're getting this, right? That's showing up on camera? The Vishkar building is shimmering back into existence, without so much as a scratch! That's their patented hard-light technology at work again, folks! There's no point in blowing up a building that can be rebuilt with the push of a button!

"Like hell! Those puffed-up scrags, I'll wear their stupid necks as a hat! All of 'em! How long'd it take to steal all that bang? They can't _do_ that!"

"..."

"I _know!_ I bloody know! Don't act like I didn't just see that!"

"..."

"Well, we'll just have to kill 'em all, right? It's the _suits themselves_ who make the buildings, yeah?"

"...HEH"

"I know, I know, I'm speaking your language, am I right? Let's get ready to show those Shit-Car stuffed shirts what happens when you throw in with the bots and their whole bloody Skynet!"

Look out, Vishkar! It looks like there's danger coming your way! Will these mad junkers succeed in their revenge-fueled quest to wipe out the entire Vishkar Corporation? We don't know, but we'll be sure to keep you updated on the latest in the hunt for these two master criminals!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled third-person past tense narration! Until next time, this has been... **A Moment in Crime!**

* * *

 

"That's right," Mercy said. "An end to death."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I *promise* this is gonna be relevant later.


	5. Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors

"...Huh." Winston took off his glasses and started cleaning them.

Mercy choked back something that might have been a sob. "Don't- don't keep me in _suspense._ Just tell me I'm crazy, already."

"It's... ambitious," he said, carefully.

"I can _do_ it," she said, staring him down. "I've been working on it for _years,_ since Overwatch disbanded. I'm _close._ "

"Wait, wait, wait. You're close?"

"I don't have the storage yet, but roughly 30 percent of the global population has sleepers in place."

"Sorry- slow down- sleepers? Storage?"

Mercy sighed the sigh she sighed when she was trying to explain a concept to him, and trying very hard not to be condescending. "Storage for brain emulations and compressed physical pattern data. Right now, I only have enough hardware reserved for Overwatch personnel backups, plus a few hundred free spaces. Scaling my operation up to eleven billion is going to require public support and funding."

"Right, that- I could have figured that one out. But... sleepers? Do you mean-"

"The nanoteams responsible for monitoring brain state. In their dormant state, they do nothing- but at my command, they awaken and begin creating a backup."

Winston was silent for a moment. Thirty percent of the global population had sleeper nanobots inside of them, which could be turned on and used to copy their brains.

"Angela, is this secure? You know Talon has a hacker- if all it takes is your command, we're at risk of-"

"Winston-"

"We're at risk of having our _brains stolen_ and read by our enemies! Thirty percent of the global population is!"

"Winston, I-"

"Do we want to run the risk that Talon's hacker sneaks into our system and writes 'I believe I am a Talon double agent' into someone's mind? Into _everyone's-_ "

"Ruhe bitte! Winston! You aren't letting me explain!"

Winston paused, put his glasses back on, and sat back in his seat.

"My system is not at risk," she said. "Firstly, if we _were_ hacked, there is no one on the planet who could interpret or modify the data. The Caduceus system... copies and pastes. For all the advances we've made in neurology- for all the advances _I've_ made in neurology- the brain remains a black box."

Winston frowned. "You told me the seat of consciousness was a specific-"

"I know hardly anything about the brain, Winston. I apologize, but if your understanding of neurology is mainly informed by what we've talked about..." she trailed off.

"All that was... mostly lies?"

"Yes," she said, hiding her face. "I truly apologize- I had to cover for myself. You had to believe I understood how it worked, or-"

"Or it'd be obvious what you were doing," Winston laughed. "Every time I suggested you publish a paper on your findings, you gave me excuses! All those rants about the corruption in academia-"

"All from the heart, I assure you," she said, grimacing. "You made an excellent choice, deciding not to pursue a doctorate."

"Regardless," he said, "we can't be sure those records will _always_ be impenetrable. Science advances by leaps and bounds every day! Even if a thief couldn't do anything to us _now,_ in the long term-"

"I must interrupt you again, actually. I said 'firstly', did I not?"

"Uh..."

" _Secondly,_ 'my command' is a chemical activator, not a wireless transmission. Easy to synthesize and distribute, in principle- but even if someone were to realize what the nanoteams were, and how they were activated? The activator encodes enough data that its pattern cannot be brute-forced by a clever chemical engineer."

He took a moment to process that.

"It's immune to computers," she offered, helpfully.

"No, I- I had it. I got that. I'm a scientist," he said. "Uh- so, for the time being, the world is safe from having its minds hacked?"

"Indeed."

There were still elements that didn't add up. D.Va remembered the experience down to the idle chatter she'd been making at the time- and while her brain may have been a black box, it was a _large_ black box. There just wasn't enough _bandwidth_ to transmit a brain-state multiple times a second! What kind of transmission was taking place?

"Still- I have a few questions," Winston said.

"Thank you for humoring me, at least."

"I'm sorry- humoring you?"

"Taking an interest in my work. It's not often I get the chance to _explain_ myself before I'm told my work is unacceptable and I ought to shut it all down."

He didn't have anything to say to that.

"...Anyway, I'm hung up on something. Right before Hana died in the high-rise, she asked me, uh... she was poking fun at my ethnicity, actually."

"Your- I'm sorry?"

"She asked if I felt at home in the, uh, 'concrete jungle'. I assume because I'm a- well, I don't think genetically speaking I'm a mountain gorilla, because of the... general tampering, but I'm told that's the base species they used, and... I don't know if cloud forests are 'jungles' exactly, but I think they count as-"

"I- sorry, does this have something to do with...?"

"Oh! Uh, sorry, no, that's a tangent, sort of. But, uh, I was about to tell her I was from the moon, and I'd never lived in a jungle. And, that's when the bomb hit, so I didn't get to tell her, uh, that."

"...Yes?"

"So, uh- the reason this has to do with your- I mean, after she came back, with Resurrect, she talked to me briefly. And she, uh, told me she realized I was from the moon, and apologized for the joke? Except, I think her apology was... part of the joke, or something, like the joke was that she thought I wasn't offended, but she was acting like I was?"

"Were you?"

"Uh, I mean, a little- I realize I'm sort of, uh, exotic, and people pay attention to that, instead of me, and... I mean, it's not a big deal, she was- she's very friendly, it didn't really bother me a _lot_ at first, because- I mean, we haven't known each other very long, and everyone gets that out of their system at first..."

"Ah... like, when I-"

"You haven't asked if I was 'monkeying around' in _years,_ Angela. Don't worry about it."

"Ahaha. Ha. But..."

"But I felt like... her joke was that _the idea that she'd apologize_ was a joke, wasn't... great."

"Mm." Angela nodded. "So... you said this had something to do with me, though?"

"Oh! Right, sorry, I kept- the tangent got away from me again. What I mean is... she remembered the joke, from seconds before she was... obliterated. So that implies you're transmitting these backups _very_ frequently, and if someone _intercepted_ them-"

"It's encrypted."

"-okay, good, but... how are you transmitting all this? It's too _much_ to send on, on a radio frequency, or something."

Mercy's face lit up. "Oh! That's- I don't send a whole brain state over the wireless! That's- you're right, that'd be impractical for a number of reasons."

"So... how, then? If you can't read minds, and store individual thoughts..."

"Yes, yes! It's very simple- I don't transmit state, except very slowly the first time someone's set up in the system. I simply record and transmit all of your sensory input data, and play it back on the stored copy!"

"All of- wait, so... these backups are _live?_ "

"That's right! Right now, a copy of you in the storage banks is receiving the input from your optic and auditory nerves, alongside slightly lower-resolution data from your somatosensory system. The net effect is that this Winston experiences the exact same thought patterns as you, and- in fact- is incapable of telling whether or not he is the _active_ Winston, or a copy!"

Winston froze. Was he... which one was he? He looked at his hands, reflexively.

"Oh, that won't help. The emulated Winston decided to move his hands the same way you just did, and his hands appeared to respond exactly the way he wanted them to. And since we're in close proximity to the receiving equipment, the lag should be unnoticeable."

"The... lag?"

"Ah, yes. There's usually some lag- your thoughts run parallel with your embodied thoughts, but while you receive sense input- for instance, proprioception associated with moving your arm- immediately? The copy feels it a few microseconds later. A great deal of the engineering work I've done is in smoothing over those little disconnects and ensuring the brains don't diverge."

That was... that was impossible, wasn't it?

"I'm sorry- you're saying, that given the exact same sensory inputs, people think and behave in _exactly_ the same way every time?"

Mercy shrugged. "Early experiments surprised me, as well! As it happens, the human brain- and the remarkably similar genetically-modified gorilla brain- is quite deterministic."

A meteor smashed into the world in Winston's head, pulverizing it.

"You... mean to say... that free will is a lie?"

Mercy smiled and shrugged. "I never found much reason to look at it that way. Certainly in one sense, I suppose? Philosophers argue over these things to no end."

"I mean... if I have to make a hard decision, I make that decision _every time,_ and it was never possible for me to make the other one?"

She looked pensive. "Philosophers argue over whether it's _really_ free will if the decision is _random_ \- that if _you_ could make any decision at any time, what does being _you_ really mean? Doesn't it look more like free will if the decision you make is entirely determined by who _you_ are, and not whether some invisible bit of chaos chose to zig rather than zag? It's of little concern to me."

"You've certainly thought a lot about it, for someone it's of little concern to."

"Guilty," she laughed. "I suppose I care about their questions as much as they do- I just prefer to search for answers in the laboratory, rather than the armchair."

"And the answers you've found are..."

"Well, they're not so cut and dry. Real life rarely is. The _random_ sort of free will _is_ present, to a degree."

"A degree?"

"I ran an experiment on myself, during development. I spun up a number of copies, and- save for a control group, I turned off lag compensation, and introduced small sources of barely-perceptible randomness into the sensory input."

"Wait, you- cloned yourself?"

"Just my brain, so... yes. Only briefly, though. After fifteen minutes, I measured how much each of the copies had diverged."

"How'd you... measure that?"

"Ah, by... a number of, what is the word, it's Latin... ad hoc, ad hoc metrics. A few I later refined into the formalized system used in the field for lag compensation. I could go into the specifics, but they mostly pointed in the same direction."

"And that direction was...?"

"It was very scattered, actually. I had to take a fairly large sample size and run the experiments several times to make sense of the patterns in the data, but the overall picture... our thoughts are very sensitive to small deviations in sensory input. How much they diverge appears to depend on how much the input deviated, but probabalistically, rather than by any direct relationship. A few dots blinking in the corner of my vision for a half second might set me off on a totally different train of thought, on the one hand. But on the other hand, a large stimulus such as a flash of heat or a loud noise... something like that may only briefly interrupt a train of thought that ends up looking nearly identical to the control group. Those examples being outliers to the general pattern, of course, but..."

Mercy was still talking about the experiment she'd run, but a question had begun to loom in Winston's mind, distracting him from the details.

"Angela?"

"Hm?"

"You said you took a, uh... fairly large sample size, right? And that these copies sometimes diverged a lot?"

"Yes?"

"How... _many_ copies did you make, exactly?"

She thought about it for a moment. "I don't remember exactly how many- my storage capacity was lower at the time, so it was a little under a hundred instances on each of... I believe it was twenty distinct runs, testing different stimuli."

Winston's face betrayed absolute horror.

"I'm sorry! I know, I exaggerated, it's not quite a large enough N. I only needed to run enough to get a sense of how to measure discrepancies properly- I might run a larger sample size sometime, if I want to get more reliable data out of it."

"Wh- no, that's not what I'm worried about! Angela, what did you _do_ with those copies when you were done with them?!"

Mercy looked confused by the question. "I... shut them down? I didn't exactly have anywhere to put a few dozen slightly different copies of myself."

"You- they'd- they'd become _different people!_ They'd _diverged!_ And you just... you _killed_ them?!"

Mercy laughed bitterly. _"That's what gets you!_ I never got this far with anyone else, haha. Genji- and Ana, too, they blew up when they understood it enough to know that I was just creating _copies_ , instead of bringing people _back._ Like there's a difference. _Souls,_ he actually believes in, in 2081!"

Winston frowned. Angela had never been so openly contemptuous of her colleagues' religious beliefs. Did she really feel that way, or was she just breaking down under pressure?

"Angela, this isn't nothing! You killed... them! Yourself! I mean..."

"I don't think of it that way. They each represented... fifteen minutes of memory? Less, if they diverged later? It's exactly as tragic as if I'd bumped my head and forgotten the past... two weeks or so."

"You can't- not everyone thinks that way, Angela!"

"Which is why I used _myself_ , and not any of the other backups I had lying around. It was my decision to make."

"No! They were- they were you, but they were _different people_!"

She nodded. "Therefore, I left each of the copies to activate their own shutdown after writing their report. Saved time on coordination."

That threw him. Several hundred of her had deliberately chosen to end their own existences, in order to make things more convenient for her... real self?

He put a hand to his head and lay down on the couch.

"Are you done?" she asked.

"Hm?"

"You've picked apart everything you could pick apart about my actual _work,_ and you can't find any reason to be upset."

"I would _absolutely_ not say _that._ "

She sighed. "Let's get this over with, Winston. You can't find a problem with my methods. So just tell me that you oppose my _goals._ "

Can't find a problem with her methods? He hadn't even _begun_ to pick apart the complexities of her scheme. There were a hundred things that could go horribly wrong, and she seemed blind to the difficulties she was facing. But...

"Oppose your goals?"

"Sure. I wonder what you'll say? 'No one man should have all that power'? The classic 'you're not God'? I just _love_ that one. How about 'you're going against the natural order'? Genji said that one with a straight face, even."

Winston sat up. "Angela, look at me."

She turned.

"What do you see here?"

"Someone who has a trap he can set off on me, and ruin the most important work in the history of mankind thanks to ideology and paranoia?" she spat. It was a lot of words to _spit_ at him, but she somehow managed it.

"Angela, I mean, literally."

"What?"

"You're looking at a genetically-engineered talking gorilla from the _Moon._ I've never met 'the natural order' even once in my entire life, and if we _did_ meet, do you really think we'd get along?"

He stood up, and walked over to the window. He looked out at the wall of blue that faced him- and at a pale white circle, faintly visible near the horizon.

Mercy approached, looking for what he was looking at out there. She couldn't see it, though- she didn't have a telescope.

He took off his glasses. They were scuffed, scratched in places, a little smeared from where he'd tried to clean them earlier. He should have replaced them a long time ago, but... no.

"I took these, because I wanted to see what was out there."

He didn't have a telescope, but even still he could see the edge of the crater, where he'd lost the first thing that was important to him. It was there, lying broken in the undisturbed moondust.

"Your glasses?"

He hadn't told her. She knew the broad strokes- everyone did, it was all over the news- but the details hadn't come up.

"Angela, it appears that everybody dies, eventually."

"Hmph," she said, turning back to look out the window.

"It appears that this is the way things are. It appears that we just have to learn to live with it, and honor the memories of the ones who came before us."

Mercy's hands were balled into fists.

"Always remember," he said, putting his glasses back on. "Never accept the world as it _appears_ to be."

Mercy turned to look at him, disbelief written into every corner of her expression.

"Dare to see it... for what it _could_ be."


	6. I cast Summon Bigger Fish

No attempt was made to avoid interrupting the pair, this time. There was the sound of a jump pack firing, and then there was a gorilla in front of the sun. Shimada instinctively moved his hand to shield his eyes, looking in his direction- although he didn't need to, since the visor filtered out damaging levels of solar radiation. Zenyatta's eyes, meanwhile... well, Winston didn't know how Zenyatta's eyes worked, or even which parts of his face were technically _eyes_ , but apparently he had no need to shield them from the sun.

He landed a short distance away. "Descartes' genius malignus," he said.

"A concept from Western philosophy," Zenyatta mused. "An unusual sort of greeting. Rather than 'hello', you posit an evil demon who deceives the senses and lies about the existence of an external world. Interesting."

"Uh, yes," Winston said. "I mean, that's what it is, but it's also the, uh..."

"The code phrase," Shimada said, his posture relaxing. "He entrusted me with instructions to carry out, in the event that he did _not_ arrive and give it to me."

"I see. And now that he has indeed returned to provide it to you..."

"It means everything is fine, I believe." He turned to Winston. "You have spoken to Dr. Ziegler, then?"

"That's right. And, uh, everything is, yes, fine. It turns out that, um, it was just a big misunderstanding."

Shimada laughed. "Was it? I am impressed, Winston! It is quite the misunderstanding that would lead you to believe all that!"

"All that?" Zenyatta asked.

"It's fine to say, since it was all groundless, correct?" Shimada asked.

Winston nervously scratched his head. He hadn't been thinking- of _course_ Shimada would want an explanation for why he thought Angela was dangerous. And... everything he'd suspected _had_ been true, actually. He couldn't tell the truth- Shimada was one of the people Angela had already tried and failed to convince. _He_ certainly wouldn't fare any better, if _she_ hadn't been able to get through to him.

Angela _may_ have been too excited at the prospect of having an ally in her conspiracy to realize the major problem- that her new ally was a _terrible liar._

"Uh- more or less, sure. No... no reason not to tell him."

"Ah, but he didn't tell me much!" Shimada said. "Winston, you tell him! I need to hear how this imagined danger came about!"

He had no idea how to deal with this. He'd never _needed_ to lie, except about how much peanut butter he'd been eating. It was part of why he hadn't stayed in academia- getting funding that way meant convincing higher-ups that he was very very confident that his research would produce groundbreaking results, and be more important than all the other research competing for funding. That took a sort of cunning that was _against_ science.

Maybe he should have gone into it, to get practice for this sort of thing.

"Well? This is going to be good, I am sure," Shimada said.

He couldn't come up with a convincing story on the fly. He needed a _distraction_ , a smokescreen. Something that would deflect Shimada's interest, or make the topic seem boring. _That_ he could probably do- boring people was something he had practice with, at least.

But what? Shimada was staring at him- if he seemed too nervous, he might think Mercy had gotten to him somehow. If it didn't seem perfectly natural, totally convincing, he'd assume he was being... blackmailed or something. He wished he hadn't come up in person- he wished he could hit undo, just vanish and try again, abort conversation-

A convenient explosion happened.

"What the-"

Out from the roof of the east wing of the Watchpoint flew two blue dragons. They coiled together and flew through the sky, chunks of steel beams and sheet metal falling from their jaws. It went without saying that Winston was _not expecting this to happen,_ and his relief at being able to change the subject was put entirely out of mind by the various competing thoughts having to do with _WHY ARE THERE DRAGONS OVER THERE._

From the smoldering wreckage of the holding area, a lone figure leapt onto the roof.

"My brother!" Genji shouted. "He's escaping! How?! I thought you said that cell would hold him!"

Winston stared blankly at the impossible dragons.

* * *

 

Several days earlier...

"Are you sure this will hold him, Winston?" Genji asked.

"Absolutely, Shimada-san. This containment unit is beyond state-of-the-art." He gestured to the interior excitedly. "The walls are three feet of nanofused steel sheeting, but that's not the half of it. Take a look."

Genji peeked inside the cell. It was simple but well-furnished, for a prison cell- Overwatch's holding cells were for interrogating hostiles, not punishing crimes. There was a carpet, a comfortable cot, a sink with a mirror and running water, and a curtain for the sanitary facilities.

"If you'll notice, there's nothing wired inside- the light is provided by a diffuse luminous alloy region in the ceiling. There's no bulb- the steel just glows. No chance of anyone causing a blackout."

"That is fine, but-"

"Obviously the door would be the weakest point- which is why we've got a live nanoteam reinforcing any damage done. All the components are rated to withstand over 400 kilonewtons of force per square inch, and any major force exerted on the door is detected and responded to with an electric shock."

Genji nodded. "It is very impressive, but I believe you are underestimating my brother. He is not the type to be cowed by mere impossible limitations."

"Ha ha! All the more reason to get him on our side, then!"

"Winston, Hanzo is a Shimada. There is a lesson taught by the long history of our clan: it is foolhardy to bet that one can contain the dragons."

"Don't worry," Winston chuckled. "I know what the dragons are capable of. Athena's keeping constant watch- we shouldn't have any trouble."

"Alright, then," Genji said, nodding. "I'm sure you know what you are doing."

* * *

 

"What on _Earth_ are _those?!"_

"The dragons!" Genji said, impatiently. "I told you it was foolhardy to think you could contain them!"

"Wh-" Winston sputtered, "Those are- what?!"

"The birthright of the Shimada bloodline! The spiritual dragons!"

"Wh- I thought those were a metaphor!"

"A _metaphor?!"_

"For the... tenacity of the Shimada clan, or their... warrior instincts, or...!"

" _No,_ they are not a _metaphor!_ They are _actual dragons!"_

"For god's sake, Genji, why didn't you _tell_ me?"

" _I thought you knew!"_

"How could I possibly know that?! How is this _possible,_ period?! It's magic!"

Zenyatta hovered nearby, softly chuckling and trying his hardest to maintain his composure.

"You've _seen_ me use them! I call upon the dragon all the time!" Genji protested.

"Wh- you just- I thought you were just being poetic about your... really good swordsmanship!"

"What?"

"Like, 'the dragon becomes me', and then you take your sword and you-"

"That's the dragon! The dragon is guiding my blade!"

" _How was I supposed to know that?!"_

"Why would you doubt what I have plainly told you?"

"Because _magic isn't real!"_

"Are you blind? Look!"

"Well _obviously_ that's- I mean, I can take those into evidence now, but prior to that- I've never seen you do anything like _that!"_

"Just because I am not as ostentatious as my brother in how I wield their power-"

"I would _really have liked to know,_ if magic was real!"

"How could you have believed it was not a real- Doctor Ziegler _raises the dead!"_

"That- that's technology!"

"What?! How in-"

Zenyatta tapped Genji on the shoulder. "Perhaps you should turn your attention to the matter at hand," he said, pointing at the wreckage of the east wing brig. The figure had leapt from the roof and to the cliffside, a couple hundred yards away.

"Ah! My brother is escaping!"

Winston nodded. "Hold on tight," he said, grabbing Genji by the waist. Genji began to protest, but quickly recognized what the plan was.

The jump pack fired, lifting the two of them into the air in Hanzo's direction. They came down hard on a rocky ledge, closing over half the distance. Hanzo was scaling the cliff face by hand, and-

An arrow flew in their direction, which Genji deflected with his wakizashi. Was that not just good reflexes? Was that a _magic dragon_ guiding his hand to deflect danger? And... if so, how much time had he _wasted_ getting the synthetic nerve response time in Genji's cyborg body down, to preserve a skill that may have had nothing to do with the quality of his reflexes?

Oh, and did Hanzo Shimada just fire an arrow at them while _scaling a sheer cliff face with his hands?_

The jump pack finished charging, fired, and the two of them finished closing the distance. They landed on the top of the cliff above Hanzo, sending a small shower of rocks down on his head.

"Brother!" Genji shouted. "What is the meaning of this?"

"Was my rejecfin nopf clear?" Hanzo asked, holding his bow in his mouth. "I hill not join your Overwatf, and you had no right to keet me vhere!"

"What was that?" Genji asked, in response to which Hanzo fired another arrow. Winston, anticipating it, deployed a barrier in time to intercept the shot- which really shouldn't have been possible for him to make.

"What fretext do you have for thif unjust incarferation?" Hanzo demanded.

"Pretext... incarceration..." Winston tried to decipher aloud.

"Why do you deserve to be imprisoned, brother?" Genji asked. "A good question! I, personally, have no idea what _possible_ reason anyone could possibly have to have you locked up! It boggles the mind!"

Hanzo growled and began climbing sideways, trying to route around the waiting Overwatch agents.

"You know it is pointless to try and escape, brother! Your guilt is a prison as mighty as any steel walls!"

Hanzo stopped trying to fire arrows in their direction, and moved Storm Bow to his back.

"Good! Do you surrender then, brother?" Genji called down.

"Look up," Hanzo growled.

Up?

Winston looked up, into the approaching faces of two giant blue dragons- dragons which had recently eaten through several feet of reinforced steel. So, those were still a real thing.

There was no time to think. His barrier wouldn't stand up to something like that- he grabbed Genji by the waist and set off the jump pack, aiming for the water below.

"No!" Genji protested, but there was no time to do whatever it was he had in mind. They were in the air, and the dragons were crashing into the cliff face. Winstone and Genji were flung into the Strait of Gibraltar, where they were nearly knocked out by the force of the water. The jump pack sparked and died, and the two of them bobbed in the sea as Hanzo scaled the remainder of the cliff and disappeared.

"That was a close one," Winston said.

"Gah!" Genji said, surfacing and spitting out seawater. "I had that under control! The dragons bend to my will as well as his- I could have turned them away!"

"Oh," Winston said, treading water. "Uh... in my defense, that's another thing I couldn't possibly have known."

Genji cocked his head to the side. "We need to talk some things through, Winston."

"...Indeed."


	7. Not Enough Hubris Not to Try

Talking things through was forced to wait. On top of that, fixing-the-smoking-rubble-that-used-to-be-the-east-wing-holding-cell was forced to wait. Under the Petras Act, the international community was not _calling_ for Overwatch response to a sudden emergency, but they were certainly winking in their direction and implying that some technically-illegal assistance wouldn't go amiss. Winston and Genji had dried themselves off, and all agents save one had assembled in the conference room.

The door slid open. "Sorry! Sorry! I'm here, loves! Got tied up for a smidge in town- we've got a mission?"

Winston turned to see Tracer vaulting over the top of one of the conference chairs and taking a seat. She was late, but that was standard Lena Oxton operating procedure. _You'd think someone with a chronal accelerator would be better at managing her time,_ he thought.

"Uh, that's right. I've got everything pulled up on the holoprojector here, just-" he started, but Tracer was already leaning in and soaking up the information.

The conference room's holoprojector displayed a map of the Mahajan Field- a stretch of largely uninhabited desert in northern India, purchased by the Omnica Corporation from the government and converted from a military firing range to a manufacturing center for Omnica products- an Omnium. The Mahajan Omnium had been seized by the "god program" Lakshmi early on in the Omnic Crisis, and the protracted military engagement against it was an early example of the impracticality of conventional warfare in the new world order.

Lakshmi had been _outthinking_ humanity's brightest military tacticians. Massively parallel computing allowed it to devise contingencies for every assault that was planned against it, handing the Indian military defeat after defeat and seizing more and more territory. As clever plans repeatedly failed, it was judged to be too dangerous to keep _fighting_ \- plans were made to employ brute force and nuke the site from orbit (the only way to be sure.) Nuclear plans met with unexpected fierce opposition in the government- powerful people mobilizing their business empires to lobby and stonewall against any nuclear propositions, citing the long-term impact of nuclear fallout.

Political opposition held up the nuclear plan for a whole month, until scientists from the nascent Vishkar Corporation presented a new weapon- a clean fission-powered EMP that would render the omnium inert, at the cost of briefly knocking out power to northern India and the surrounding areas. The plan was judged to be a highly-effective and low-cost measure to end the war, and the EMP bomb was set to be deployed- until the same political opposition suddenly scrambled to find new reasons to shut the plan down. This suspicious behavior was investigated, and the anti-bombing lobby was found to have been blackmailed thoroughly by Lakshmi. Scandal rocked the government, obstacles to the EMP deployment collapsed, and the weapon was fired on Lakshmi immediately, shutting it down and ending the Omnic Crisis in India.

(The many businesses found to be complicit in Lakshmi's plans were severely penalized, and subsequently bought up by Vishkar as their stock collapsed. This was generally agreed to be _very very suspicious_ by anyone paying any attention, but no conclusive evidence of foul play was ever found.)

The holoprojector also displayed several reports- news drones were reporting on a sudden attack by Talon on the Helix Security forces stationed at the defunct Mahajan Omnium. It went without saying that Talon was planning on reactivating Lakshmi or something, and Overwatch was uniquely positioned to put the kibosh on that.

"So if I've got this sorted," Lena spoke up, "Talon wants to turn on an evil computer, and we've got to stop them!"

"Correct," Athena said. "However, we must keep in mind our secondary mission: if we arrive too late, and Lakshmi has been reactivated, we're to shut her down."

"Got it!" Lena grinned. "What are we waiting for? Let's get to it already!"

"Well, hold on," Winston said. "Since we're dealing with a, uh, 'god program', maybe, there are some precautions we need to go over."

"Precautions?"

Winston nodded. "Protocols and so on. Fighting a god program is a considerably more dangerous undertaking than just fighting Talon. That's why I've called in an... outside consultant."

"Outside consultant?" Angela asked.

He gestured to an armored figure, who'd been seated motionless in a darker part of the conference room. "Allow me to introduce," he said, flicking the lights on that side of the room on for what he hoped would be dramatic effect, "our, uh... client, the Chief of Security for Helix International."

The figure stood from their chair, reached up, and removed their face-concealing helmet. Underneath was a familiar face, bearing an Eye of Horus tattoo. McCree drew a sharp breath and backed up in his seat, before getting a better look and calming down.

"Chief Fareeha Amari. It's good to see you all again."

There was a general uproar of surprise, drowned out primarily by one booming voice in particular.

"FAREEHA!" Reinhardt shouted. "It's been so LONG!" He immediately got up from his seat- or, no, he hadn't been using a chair, he'd just been sitting on the floor to maintain eye level with the rest of them. In a few steps he'd crossed the room and wrapped Fareeha in an immobilizing bear hug- her hesitant steps back had been insufficient to escape his grasp.

"Ah- Reinhardt. It's- agh- good to see you, too," said a voice from somewhere buried in Reinhardt's hug radius.

"Unbelievable! CHIEF of security! I had NO IDEA! I'm so PROUD of you!"

A few others were out of their seats- mainly the old guard, who remembered Fareeha living with them in the Watchpoint during the glory days. Ms. Song and Mr. dos Santos (was that how the last name worked? He wasn't sure) remained seated, looking on in amusement.

Reinhardt had lifted Fareeha up to sit on his shoulder, like he had when she was little. He was laughing boisterously, whereas Fareeha had turned as red as her complexion would allow. (Angela, for some reason, had also turned red.) Lena managed to snap a picture with her phone before Fareeha let herself down.

"Uh, alright," Winston said. "It's great that we have Fareeha with us, but, um, can we refocus on the mission briefing?"

"Aw, Winston! Let us have this!" Lena protested.

Fareeha, on the other hand, looked incredibly relieved to have a change of subject. He felt a little bad for encouraging this kind of display with the dramatic introduction he'd arranged.

"Chief Amari- callsign 'Pharah'," Winston began ("You got a codename? Tops!" "So proud!" "Just like you always wanted, right?"), "is here to explain to us the dangers associated with, uh, confronting a god program. She's had first-hand experience shutting down threats like these, and she has inside intelligence on the layout of the defunct omnium."

Pharah broke away from the fawning crowd and made her way to the holoprojector controls.

"Thank you, Winston," she said, bringing up a slideshow. "There's only one real vulnerability you have to worry about- at least, only one which you wouldn't need to worry about with a very smart human opponent."

An image of a group of security officers flickered onto the projector. Half of them had their guns turned on the other half- and on closer inspection, one half was composed of omnics, and the other humans.

"Nothing network-enabled can be allowed into its effective range. It's futile to try and secure your network against intrusion- cryptographic network security tools we'd thought _proven_ secure were broken within _minutes,_ flying in the face of what should have been mathematical laws. Our own people were erased and turned into puppets, despite our best efforts. A god program is the _ultimate_ hacker."

"They're after a hacker, y'say? Don't they already have one of those?" McCree asked.

Pharah shook her head. "Not one who can split their consciousness into an arbitrary number of processing cores to attack all of our systems simultaneously, and directly manage every compromised device. Talon's hacker, from what our cybersecurity divison has deduced, relies more on social engineering and direct EMP destruction of systems. Talon is capable of _sabotaging_ networked systems, but not _controlling_ them except in isolated cases."

"So," McCree said, "this thing might hack my arm, and have it go around shootin' folks?"

"That depends," Pharah said. "Only _networked_ devices are vulnerable to god program tampering. Anything that accepts a wireless signal is potentially vulnerable- but if your arm's systems are implemented in wired hardware, it's likely safe."

"Fareeha has generously provided us with Helix Security's wireless vulnerability standards manual," Winston said. "I've taken the liberty of running its automated tests on the live-update specifications of some of our equipment, so, uh..."

Winston hit a button, and some diagrams came up on the holoprojector. Tracer's chronal accelerator and pulse pistols, spiderwebbed with green schematic diagrams and checkmarks. It lit up green. "Tracer, you're good to go. None of your hardware has network capabilities."

"Excellent!"

"If you don't mind, though," Athena interrupted, "when we reach enemy airspace, Tracer, you're going to need to manually pilot the MV-261 Orca. It's full of networked components which we'll need to shut down, and I won't be able to act as remote operator once we're inside Lakshmi's potential signal bombardment radius."

"No worries, love! It's been a while since I've had a chance to do the old day job!"

More schematics flashed past. McCree's arm and Peacekeeper, all cleared. The arm _had_ to be all wired, to support the man's unnatural reflexes. Reinhardt's suit, with no computer-controlled equipment whatsoever- all "precision German engineering", his words. Torbjörn's equipment was likewise mainly hardware- the targeting computer on his turret was the only computer system, and it didn't have any remote control options. Winston's own equipment had a couple of red marks- places where he needed to disable various remote-operation features in the hardware. A five-minute job, doable on the Orca ride over.

Genji's came up onscreen. There were... a _lot_ of red marks.

"What does this mean, exactly?" he asked from behind Winston, startling him.

"Uh... well, let me take a look."

Genji's construction was mostly wired to nerve endings, much like McCree's prosthetic arm. However, it appeared he'd installed a number of aftermarket omnic body mods, a number of which were wired directly to his systems and had open network ports.

"Shimada-san, what's this?"

"Eh? Oh, that is my RSS feed. I use it to keep up on news in the gaming world."

"And you've plugged the 'gaming world' directly into... your audio processing units?"

"I get an alert when the major news sites update," he said, shrugging. "Beep."

Pharah walked over. "Unless you disable this, Lakshmi will be able to take control of your... ears. You may find your thoughts drowned out by deafening, agonizing noise."

"...Well. I believe I can handle-"

"Sorry," Winston cut in, "what's this stuff connected to your _arms?"_

"Ah, that is my juggling mod. For juggling purposes."

"Juggling purposes...?" Pharah asked.

"Ah- there was a joke between myself and my mentor, on the subject of-"

"Is there a reason it's got an open network port?" Winston asked.

"Automatic updates," he said. "Whenever a new juggling routine is pushed to the DextroDex Community Spotlight archive, I download-"

"Shimada-san, these are _enormous_ security vulnerabilities! Lakshmi could hack your arms!" He paused. "Also, wait, every time you showed off a juggling routine, that was just something you copied from the internet?"

"I am not entering any _competitions,"_ he protested. "Performance enhancement is not illegal except under tourna- wait. Go back to... hack my arms?"

Winston continued scrolling past red X after red X. "Shimada-san, we don't have time to disable each and every one of these third-party network ports. You're going to have to sit this mission out."

"What?!"

"Almost every part of your body is vulnerable to being hacked by a god program! Or... honestly, by any clever enough hacker. We need to have a talk about your personal security!"

Genji wasn't the only one with significant vulnerabilities. Lúcio's sonic amplifier needed to receive signals from its medical nanos, and the Vishkar technology its abilities operated on was poorly-understood and potentially vulnerable at the best of times. D.Va's mech had a number of networked parts, but she, in her words. "wasn't a noob"- her MEKA featured manual overrides for the shutdown and self-destruct features, meaning that the worst that could happen was that her mech would end up useless. Mei-Ling's drone, Snowball, was hooked into various meteorological update feeds and couldn't come along (although her own endothermic blaster was mechanically-regulated.)

And then Winston scrolled to the next loadout, and realized they were all in very big trouble.

Caduceus was red all over, unsurprisingly. It needed to get wireless feedback from its nanoteams, and those nanoteams needed to receive commands from the staff. That meant that Mercy would need to sit out the fight.

Or, it _would_ mean she needed to sit out the fight, if her presence made any difference one way or the other.

He gave her a meaningful look from across the room, and motioned her to follow him outside. She broke off her conversation with Fareeha, and followed him out to the hallway. It was lit well enough that they could be sure nobody was hiding nearby, and they were far enough away from the rest not to be overheard.

"Angela, do you realize what you've done?"

"What?"

"The- the god program! We've got your... monitoring system stuff in us. It could hack those nanobots!"

Mercy frowned. "Those only record and transmit data. They don't modify tissue- anything like that has to be deployed directly by Caduceus. It... should be safe."

 _"Should be safe?_ Lakshmi can take direct control of compromised systems- are you saying there's nothing it could do to damage our brains by reprogramming the coordinating units for the monitoring system?"

"...It's possible, but the base level nanobots barely have locomotion, much less manipulators. It could potentially... direct them all to accumulate in some sensitive blood vessels, and give us aneurysms?"

Oh, well, _that_ was just fine. Deadly aneurysms for everyone, no problem there.

"That's still _very bad_ , Angela. Aneurysms are bad. We would probably all die, if it managed that."

"I... I can fix that, though."

"Even if _you_ die?"

"Athena can reconstruct me from my backup, and I can manage the rest of us using raw material stores. It'd be difficult to explain how we died in India and suddenly came back in Gibraltar, but... it's not the end of the world."

"It's still a _lot_ worse than the scenario where we _don't_ have nanobots in our heads, and aren't in danger of having our brains directly attacked."

"...Worse than the scenario where we're all already dead several times over, then?"

Winston groaned in exasperation. She had a point. "Can we... at least shut down the recorders for this mission? Shut them down, shut down Caduceus, only turn them back on when we're sure the facility is secure and Lakshmi isn't enabled?"

Mercy thought about this.

"If anyone died, they wouldn't remember the mission," she pointed out.

"That's not the most important thing," he said, realizing something.

"Hm?"

"If Lakshmi killed us all at once with aneurysms, the idea is that we'd all get resurrected back here, right?"

She nodded, unsure where he was going.

"There's a flaw there- we can't be sure of zero casualties, even if you manage that."

She thought for a moment, uncertain, before her eyes widened. _"Fareeha...!"_

"Pharah, all of her allies suddenly dead, surrounded by Talon forces and an active god program?"

"Right. No, of course. I'll return the transmitters to chemical dormancy," she said.

Winston nodded, surprised by how quickly that had turned her around. He would have expected her to offer more rationalizations, trying to minimize the apparent risk. But... no, that had been sufficient, for some reason. 

Angela pressed some buttons on Caduceus. If he fell in battle, watching those buttons would be his most recent memory when he woke up.


	8. Quick Play

Now traveling to Mahajan Field...

Prepare to attack!

Select your hero...!

Overwatch's strike force- eight personnel and two outside consultants- split up into two groups. Standard distraction tactics applied- shock troops would charge the main gate, mobilizing the enemy forces and drawing fire. A more mobile recon group would use the opening to enter the facility and start neutralizing priority targets, shifting to the distraction role depending on how enemy forces distributed their own personnel.

"Y'all ready for this?"

"I believe so," Pharah said. "This really works?"

"You gotta believe in the power, man! Music moves the body and soul!"

"Sure, but... it actually makes us able to move faster?"

"Listen," Lúcio said, "Vishkar's gonna tell you this is all about hard-light nanobots, and cleanin' up lactic acid, and induced reoxywhatever, but let's be real? It's these _beats_ that make the magic happen. Check it- got some classic Hideki Naganuma mixed up, feel it!"

"We're approaching the drop!" Tracer shouted. "Everyone hold on!"

Reinhardt was first out the door, his shout nearly drowning out Lúcio's music. "FOR PEACE ON EARTH!!!"

"That's our cue!"

Lúcio dropped after Reinhardt into the cloud of billowing dust, swapping his skates to all-terrain mode. Jesse McCree wasn't far behind, pulling on a domino mask with glass lenses. He disappeared into the desert sands in a really cool, Clint Eastwood kind of way, he'd have said. Bullets from Talon's front guard whizzed past in his wake.

"Are you ready?" Mei asked Pharah.

"Affirmative," she said, taking one knee.

"I'm overclocking the endothermic regulator- get ready!" Mei said, hopping up onto the back of Pharah's armor. Pharah's jump jets flared, and the two of them soared into the sky above the other three members of the team. Tracer flipped some switches, and the Orca veered off to the right.

Pharah couldn't stay aloft long with the added weight- they were riding on the momentum of the initial jump, with barely seconds left before they fell. They were barely a few meters above the others, and Mei hadn't fired her weapon yet. "How much longer?"

A clunking sound, and then a WHFFF. "Whoa! Exciting!" Mei said.

"What? Did you fire it?"

"Oh- right, yes! It's out!"

Mei had fired a projectile from her endothermic blaster- a condensed ball of reaction mass, sucking the heat out of the air as it passed. It flew halfway to the Omnium ahead, eventually bursting like a firework and stopping short. For a few tense seconds, it didn't appear to do anything...

But then the freezing air in the snowball's path condensed, creating a miniature low-pressure region in a straight line towards the omnium. The pulling force wasn't enough to lift the men on the ground, but it _was_ enough to lift a cloud of dust from the earth into the air. A vast smokescreen rose into being along their charge path, hiding the strike team from view.

"That's it! We did it!"

"Understood. Let's begin our descent."

Mei strapped on a pair of goggles as Pharah descended into the dust cloud behind the rest of the team. The five of them were hidden from view, and Talon shots from afar went wide. The team charged through the artifical dust storm, closing in on the Mahajan Omnium.

* * *

Prepare your defenses!

Select your hero...!

"They've entered firing range," a voice whispered over the communicator.

"Then start _firing_ at them, and don't bother me about it," a voice growled in response.

"D'accord."

The first line of defense took aim. Widowmaker and five other Talon snipers began shooting for the Overwatch aggressors who'd dropped out of the plane. She fired, and she missed- and then she fired again, and she missed again. She missed both times. It was to be expected- the wind was unpredictable here, and she'd have a better shot when they got closer. Their own projectile attacks appeared ineffecual, as well. They began closing the distance, becoming bigger targets, and-

A massive dust cloud erupted in front of the enemy. What? How did they- where did that come from? Did they plant explosives ahead of time? No, that was impossible- nobody had been expecting Talon's arrival.

No, it wasn't useful to speculate on how they'd put up the smokescreen. She pulled down her visor, activating infra-sight and relaying thermal data to the other operatives' heads-up displays. The Overwatch agents lit up red in the midst of the storm.

She put a bullet in one of them- it would have been Jesse, with his ridiculous hat. He staggered, but resumed running- it hadn't been a fatal hit, and it appeared they had the Brazilian healer with them. No matter- better aim on the next shot, and she'd have them-

Wait. One of the five had disappeared from view. The one in the back, who'd been riding on the armored flier. How had they circumvented her thermal imaging?

To make matters worse, the others started disappearing one by one, their thermal signatures vanishing. Before long, Overwatch's team was completely hidden, without taking casualties. They'd hidden themselves perfectly, and they'd be closing the distance any minute now. Was she going to get to kill _anyone?_

"Zut alors."

* * *

Prepare to attack!

Select your hero...!

"So- I know we've done the noise testing, but just to confirm... you have no decentralized network ports?"

"That is correct. I and my brethren were designed after the Crisis, and we have been engineered with such attacks in mind. All of my network inputs are centrally managed."

"And according to Shimada-san, your audiovisual inputs-"

"Dynamic neural nets, I assure you. I can no more be hacked than yourself."

"And you've read up on our agent protocols? Safety standards? Field maneuvering?"

"My pupil was happy to become the teacher for a day. If there is any detail he has not conveyed to me with breathless exuberance, I cannot imagine what it would be."

Winston nodded, checking things off his checklist. Checklists were one of the world's purest goods.

"It's not an interrogation, Winston! Just trust him already!" Lena called from the cockpit.

Zenyatta chuckled. "Your friends certainly are eager to demand trust on my behalf, I see."

He nodded. "That's how they are, yes. _Someone's_ got to do the worrying around here."

Winston reviewed Zenyatta's file again. He'd volunteered for the mission, and he'd apparently already gone through the application process- not that it was strictly _necessary,_ since Overwatch operations were illegal and independently-funded now. They _could_ just let anyone join without doing background checks and so on- but he wanted things to transition smoothly once the world inevitably welcomed them back. Bringing Zenyatta on this mission had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, mainly pushed by Shimada, and would serve as a test run for full membership.

(He'd asked Angela if he'd be another Pharah situation, but apparently she'd already... 'registered' him with her system while he'd been staying with Genji.)

Zenyatta's combat abilities apparently relied on a ring of versatile "orbs". He'd thought those were, like, prayer beads, or something, but evidently they were projectile weapons. He manipulated them manually with paramagnetic tensor fields, and apparently could use them to heal allies- probably biotic first aid, although Shimada hadn't specified in the report. Shimada had also mentioned that his orbs could cause foes to "suffer bad luck", which he'd earlier written off as superstition or a funny euphemism for "suffer getting hit with a heavy metal sphere really hard".

But... was this a dragons situation again? He had no idea, and he had no time to ask.

"We're coming in hot, loves! I'm putting her in autopilot!"

The Orca started coming in for a landing near the outer wall of the Mahajan Omnium's human operations wing. They had a brief window to make their move before the Orca landed hard in the dust outside.

"Is everyone ready?" Angela asked.

Lena blinked over to the bay door in response. Zenyatta gave a thumbs up. "I call mid," Hana said, flicking on the pilot light on her MEKA's jetpack. 

"What?" Winston asked.

Lena interrupted him. "Alright! Ready? We're in position in three... two... one..."

Winston grabbed Zenyatta- huh, warmer than he expected- and fired his jump pack, leaping out of the Orca bay door and landing on the wall of the facility. Mercy used her Valkyrie suit's Guardian Angel tether to follow behind D.Va's jetpack.

Tracer just blinked three times in quick succession, landing hard on the wall and rolling to a stop.

"WOOOOO! What a rush! I love-" Tracer said, before being interrupted by the crunching sound of the Orca crash-landing into a sand dune.

All five of them peeked over the wall at where the Orca had come to a stop. It looked... completely fine, actually. It'd kicked up a cloud of dust, but it appeared intact.

"See? I nailed it!"

"What? You crashed it into a hill!" D.Va argued.

"No, that was the idea! I picked a soft landing spot!"

"A soft landing spot?" she said, not relenting. "It's _sand!_ Sand is just a pile of rocks!"

"No, it- see, it grazed the top, I didn't set it to plunge right into the whole thing! I made it so it'd look like we crashed and that we all died!"

"Without telling us?" Mercy asked.

"I improvised! I thought, what if that AI shuts down our autopilot? We'd crash-land anyway! So why not set the autopilot to crash-land somewhere totally safe?"

"Can we do less _improvising_ when we're jumping out of a carrier ship into enemy-held territory?" Winston asked.

"You lot are _no_ fun, you know that?"

* * *

Prepare your defenses!

Select your hero...!

A clawed glove tore apart an old monitor in the darkness.

"GrrrrRRRRAAAAH!"

"I told you, boss."

"There has to be _something,_ damn it! Backups!"

"What'd I say? It was an EMP, pendejo. That means the _hardware_ gets blanked, backups included."

"She would have made something _resistant._ She knew there was a threat!"

"Kind of hard to resist a magnetic field with the force of a nuke behind it, y'know."

He roared and lifted a file cabinet, hurling it across the room. Black smoke curled around his arms.

"Ooh, good idea. I'll check inside there," the hired help said, inspecting the smashed-open cabinet. "Nope! Just more copy paper."

"Paper," he said. "She could have copied herself to paper. She had _days_ to prepare."

"Paper? You lost your head or something? That's _exabytes_ of neural architecture and line weights. You'd need to deforest the whole _planet_ to fit one percent of Lakshmi's data on _paper._ And collating all that, reading it back in, and uploading it to substrate? How about _no."_

"RrrRRRRRRgRHgHGghhhhh..."

"That's a good point, though. Something else, not magnetic storage? Who knows? But if it's a thing, she probably came up with it herself. We wouldn't recognize it if we saw it, if it exists. Helix had years to check and double check."

"Then we _triple_ check. She's a _god program,_ she wouldn't get wiped out by just a _bomb._ It's _impossible."_

"Not really," she said. "You can't really outsmart a bomb, if it's big enough. I _told_ you all this stuff, and you decided you wanted to come anyway."

He took a deep breath, then dissolved. His body came apart, and the sensation in his nerves numbed, with no limbs to take input from. He moved by deciding where he wanted to be, and then moving there- specifically, right in front of his insubordinate cohort. The smoke swiftly coalesced into a form that towered over the hacker, glaring down at her with a bone-white mask.

She laughed, reaching out and tapping the mask around the middle part. "Boop!"

Reaper recoiled from Sombra's touch. "Don't do that."

"I mean, you just put yourself in range there. What else were you expecting?" she asked. "To intimidate me?"

His growling only intensified her laughter.

"Whatever," he said, crushing a shotgun in his hand. "It was a long shot. It doesn't matter. Ziegler will show her face anyway, and _then_ we can put an end to this _worthless_ charade."

* * *

Three...

Two...

One...

Capture the objective!

"Ice wall, coming up!"

The front gate of the Mahajan Omnium wasn't really a gate- it wasn't meant for humans to move in and out of. It was a 30-meter circular hole in the wall, leading to a wide factory floor, but that hole was six meters off the ground. It was meant more for launching flying drones than it was for Omnium access- "getting inside" wasn't much of a concern for an automated drone factory. There was a crane for lifting less mobile units up and through, but that wasn't an option they had for getting inside.

Which was why Mei-Ling Zhou was a member of the strike force.

A wall of ice rose up, forming a long and narrow ramp up to the Omnium deployment gate. Reinhardt activated his rocket boost, and McCree hopped up on his right arm to catch a ride. Lúcio followed close behind, staying underneath Reinhardt's shield. The shield functioned as an umbrella against Talon's men firing from emplacements up on the ramparts.

"HAAAAAHAHAHAHA! JUSTICE rises to higher heights!" Reinhardt roared, careening off the edge of the ramp and through the gate. McCree held on to his hat with his free hand, and gulped as he saw the drop Reinhardt had sent them sailing to. Lúcio followed closely behind, and likewise braced himself for the six-meter fall.

Pharah and Mei, however, didn't quite have the speed to make it up the ramp before Talon's men blew it apart. They fell short of the gate, tumbling into the ice and sand.

"Aaaa!"

Bullets peppered their location- some pinging off Pharah's armor, one slipping through and burying itself in her leg. Mei appeared to likewise be wounded, but she managed to put up a defensive shell of ice before things got worse.

"Are you okay?" Mei asked.

"I'm- nngh- I'm fine. My Raptora suit handles- agh! It handles mobility. It hurts, but I can walk."

Mei nodded, ignoring her own bullet wounds- she'd apparently frozen them shut, until she could meet up with Lúcio and get real treatment.

"Here," she said, and applied the same ice patch to Pharah's leg wound. She winced in pain briefly, before it was numbed by the cold. The two of them took cover under the ice until the enemy fire stopped.

(It stopped very quickly, because the first wave of Talon agents on the ramparts all suddenly found themselves with bullet wounds of their own- McCree's Peacekeeper had seen to that.)

Pharah spoke into her communicator. "Recon leader, strike force is in. We've been split up, but we'll rendezvous shortly. Vanguard Talon forces have been neutralized."

* * *

"Copy that, strike leader," Winston said. "We haven't encountered resistance yet, but we'll keep you updated."

"How is it?" Mercy asked.

"They're fine. It looks like insertion was a success. Now we've just got to sweep the facility, and make sure there's no Talon presence hiding out."

It appeared Lakshmi hadn't been reactivated yet, which made things easier. It'd been trivial to subdue the handful of troops on the roof, and they'd found a way down into the building quickly. Mercy was keeping Caduceus powered down for the time being, in case Lakshmi's inactivity was a ruse.

The room they'd entered via the roof appeared to be a fairly standard cubicle-plan office. There were some tables scattered around, covered in simple tools and machine parts. This was probably the Omnica Corporation's direct engineering wing, where defective equipment was sent for inspection.

"Uh, could I get a hand?" Hana asked.

"Hm?" Winston turned around- apparently her MEKA had become lodged in a narrow doorway.

"Wait, no, hang on- I got this." Her jetpack fired, and the doorframe began to creak- until it finally buckled under the force, sending D.Va careening through the room and obliterating several desks.

"That's... going to be a problem, if we do this for every room," Winston pointed out.

"Oh! I've got it!" Lena said. "See the windows? Those are pretty big! Just go in and out by the windows!"

"Hey, great call, Tracer!"

"Wait- no, hold on. You're just going to break every single-" Winston protested, a moment too late to stop D.Va from smashing through the plate glass and making her way around to the next room. "-window? Great."

"Come off it, Winston! This place is abandoned! We don't need to worry about the windows!" Lena said.

"Perhaps so," Zenyatta spoke up, "but it saddens me to see the work of an artisan destroyed so casually."

"What?" Tracer asked. "It's an omnium, the whole place was probably built by rob..." she trailed off.

Zenyatta nodded. "This whole place was probably built by robots, indeed. Some architect, some construction worker, poured their heart and soul into this work."

"I'm- I'm sorry, I didn't... I meant like, um, the kind that doesn't have a soul?"

"And which kind is that?" he asked.

Tracer turned red. "I- y'know, like, old kinds! The ones that were just, not people! Not omnics!"

Zenyatta stared at her, silently. She started turning red under what she thought was an accusatory look- although there was really no way of knowing, with Zenyatta.

"I- come off it, really? What did I say wrong? Did I say something wrong?"

Zenyatta chuckled. "No, no. I merely wonder... what led you to that assumption?"

"I... I mean..."

"I do not mean to accuse you of anything," he said. "Yet this facility was likely built by robots from the Omnica Corporation. In all likelihood, they _were_ omnics. However, you say you thought otherwise?"

"I- because- I mean, it doesn't matter, does it? We've got to search this place lickety-split! There's terrorists! What's some glass?"

"I wonder," Zenyatta said, "if you first decided the building was unimportant, and _then_ searched your mind for a reason to excuse yourself."

Tracer looked around in frustration. "I- I guess?"

"Your true justification for breaking the windows, then, was expidiency in the face of a grave danger. I believe that evaluation was wise- and yet this did not suffice for you. You believed that not only should your need outweigh the cost of the sacrifice, but that the cost of the sacrifice _should not exist._ "

"Uh- what? I don't see what you're getting at, love."

"You think yourself a hero, do you not?"

Tracer nodded- but hesitantly, as if the question were a trap.

"As a hero, you will often be called to wield force, wield violence, for the sake of protecting others. You will be called to strike down your enemies, because the lives you intend to save outweigh the lives you are forced to take."

Everyone in the room looked uncomfortable at this. They were all soldiers, when it came down to it. They'd all fought in the wars that defined their time. Blood was on all their hands- or, most of their hands. Angela tried to keep hers clean, but for some reason she seemed more affected than all the rest. Winston met her eyes, and she turned away.

"I- yeah, love. I know that. We've all had to come to terms with that, right?" Tracer said.

"Indeed. However, I urge you- do not ignore the costs of what you do. Every one of these Talon men you kill is a life snuffed out, even if doing so saves the lives of many others. Do not fool yourself into thinking that because their lives _must_ be paid as a cost, that the cost does not exist. It is not _fine_ , not _okay_ that they die- only _necessary._ Content yourself with the justice of your actions."

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

"But," Tracer said, "It's just _windows,_ though. And not even windows people are using! They're abandoned windows!"

"Oh, of course," Zenyatta replied. "The windows are hardly of consequence- I was merely making a joke. Feel free to smash them if it is necessary."

"What- hold the phone! You gave us that whole speech-"

"Hey! What are you scrubs doing back there?" Hana called from the other room. "We're kinda in the middle of something, remember? Get a move on!"

"Hold on a mo', love! I'm being held hostage by a robot trying to teach me life lessons!"

"We _do_ need to get a move on, actually," Winston pointed out.

"Wait, wait, wait," Tracer said, "is this- is this what it's like for Genji _all the time?"_

"I'm sorry?" Zenyatta asked.

"It IS! He's not here, so now _I'm_ your Genji!"

"That's not... I wouldn't say that, exactly..."

"You miiiiiiss him!" Tracer sang, attempting to pinch his cheeks (unsuccessfully, because of metal.)

"I-"

"That's _adorable,_ I'm going to tell him _aaaall_ about it!"

Winston put a hand on Tracer's shoulder. "Lena, let's not waste time harrassing our coworkers. We've got a mission to complete."

She slumped, but acquiesced and blinked off to join D.Va.

The five of them proceeded through the building, sweeping each room in turn. There wasn't much in the way of human facilities- the offices were spartan but spacious, indicative of the superfluity of human staff at the Omnium. People had likely only been stationed here as some kind of legal requirement, not because they were strictly needed to keep the Omnium running. The area also seemed unimportant to Talon's plans, as they didn't find anyone trying to block their way.

After a quick search, they moved on to the next wing of the facility- the data export bank, where the more human-like omnics processed information and relayed it in plain Hindi to Omnica's local investors. It was a multi-level area, spanning three floors with open staircases and railings.

Omnic corpses littered the room, slumped over in chairs in front of consoles. They'd all died long ago, when the Indian government had deployed Vishkar's EMP. Or- no, they'd died before that, when their minds were hijacked and overwritten by Lakshmi. It was an eerie metal graveyard, a scene of bustling activity gone still and dark as if frozen in time.

Zenyatta approached the nearest body, putting a hand on its head and whispering something in Nepali. It was hard to read his emotions, but he looked more solemn than usual.

"Do you think-" Mercy began, and then there was an explosion.

"Whoa! AAAAAAAA!" Tracer shouted, her voice disappearing into the distance. The explosion had been loud, but it had to have been... it wasn't an incendiary explosive, it was compressed air, because there hadn't been any light or heat. It was similar technology to Pharah's concussive blast- intended to scatter a team, not kill. How had the bomb been deployed- and why _hadn't_ it been lethal?

Zenyatta landed on top of him a moment after he hit the wall.

"Zenyatta! Are you okay?"

"I believe so, although-"

Suddenly, a slamming sound came from the windows- metal shutters closed, plunging the room into darkness.

"Oh, I've got this!" D.Va said, from where she'd landed on the other side of the room, and turned on all her MEKA's indicator lights. Green LEDs lit up the room, revealing Tracer collapsed next to her. That only left Mercy unaccounted for, and D.Va was scanning the room with her lights-

A distorted voice called out from somewhere.

"Apagando las luces, pendejos."

Winston's fur suddenly stood on end. What was that? Where had it come from? What was happening?! "Strike leader!" Winston shouted into his comm. "We've been engaged! Close in on our-" he got out, before he realized the comm had died. His jump pack was likewise malfunctioning, and his barrier generator wouldn't respond. They'd been scrambled by... an EMP?

Winston turned to Zenyatta, who... was lying unconscious on the floor. Was he- no! He couldn't be dead, that- it hadn't been a strong enough EMP to knock out his own power suit and Tesla cannon, much less fry an omnic. He scooped up Zenyatta with one hand, and checked for damage.

He breathed a sigh of relief, seeing the flickering of his indicator lights. He was fine, albeit stuck in his rebooting sequence for a while.

"Hello? Mercy? Tracer? D.Va? Is anyone there?"

His call was met with with silence, and then a bright purple light flickering on in front of him. And then another light, and another, outlining a figure in the darkness.

"Hola, Winston," the figure greeted him.

"What? Who are you? How do you know-"

"Your name? How many other talking gorillas does Overwatch have? You're not asking the right question."

"Uh-"

"Actually, forget the right question. You need to come with me, quickly." She projected a path of purple light along the floor nearby, leading to a spacious air vent.

"What? Who are- is everyone okay? I need to regroup with my team!"

"There's no time! I assure you, they're fine."

"You're going to need to explain what you're doing here, and why I should trust you," he said, carefully. "For all I know, you could be with Talon! I mean, you're _probably_ with Talon, it should just be us and them here, besides-"

"Helix! Right, that's right, I'm with Helix. I'm one of the few survivors, yeah? Come with me, quick- there's something you need to see."

There was very little about this situation he trusted, but-

"Hurry! He has Mercy!"

What?! "Wait- who has Mercy?"

"Rea- their leader! The Reaper guy! He's interrogating her in the observation bay- you need to hurry!"

...Time pressure. He sighed. A sudden nonlethal ambush designed to disorient, a threat, and the need to _act now_ or else? This was probably some kind of trap... but he _couldn't_ afford to let Angela fall into Reaper's hands. The worst-case scenario was if she got kidnapped- if it came down to it, he was a 400-pound gorilla in a suit of armor, and his enemies were _not_ 400-pound gorillas in suits of armor.

He nodded and followed the supposed Helix survivor into the air vent.


	9. If You Could Hear, At Every Jolt

She stood, pistol at the ready, three meters away from Death. It wasn't a threat- it was, if anything, a gesture of peace, a sign that things were not unusual. To brandish _life_ at Death would be the threat, the provocation. Her _true_ threat went unspoken- she aimed her gun at his head, to reassure him that this meeting was happening on _his_ terms.

Death laughed softly, and his laugh struck her in the chest and sent her falling, falling, back into the past.

* * *

Switzerland, 2070

It was too much to manage at once. Blackwatch's dirty laundry being aired to the world put pressure on _all_ of them, constantly bombarding them with questions from the press and angry condemnations from the people. That would have been bad enough, if they hadn't still been reeling from Ana's death, or if the mission in Hong Kong hadn't been such a disaster. Distractions assailed her on every side.

She shut it out of her mind. If she let herself slip, she'd lose track of the patterns. The C-teams were working, and the B-teams were mostly stable. D, R, F, and Ω subcrews were finally self-sustaining, they weren't an issue. The problem was with the A-teams- they could direct reconstruction, but not the transfer to the D-subcrew biotic systems. That left her to fulfill their function manually. She had to memorize them all- the chemical signals indicating normal function, the gene normalization patterns, and the characteristic status indicators.

It'd be so much easier with an em processor- but she couldn't hide one of those. Running a brainstate live would simplify everything, if she had the hardware to run it. It would simplify data transfer by orders of magnitude- real-time backups, not to mention free processing power to run the A-teams non-programmatically.

Athena, though. All hardware moving in and out of Overwatch had to be vetted by Athena for security purposes- and there was no chance of her missing an errant em processor. It'd multiply the scandal- an Overwatch agent, found in possession of the technology that enabled the god programs to bring humanity to its knees? It wouldn't matter that she was running human brains, not artificial decision systems- they'd be shut down in a heartbeat. "Overwatch Risks Second Omnic Crisis," the headlines would read. Out of the question.

So she had to focus. Had to refresh the GNPs and CSIs in her working memory, had to be able to rescue anyone at any time. No time for sleep.

The voice of Death whispered quietly over a private channel.

"Dr. Ziegler. I have to request your presence in the Watchpoint Apex."

"Gabriel?" she asked. "What is it? Why is this over direct comm?"

"I can't let him know I'm calling for help," Death answered. "A public call on the emergency channel would set him off."

Her blood ran cold. "Set him off? Who? What's happening?"

"You _know_ what's happening. Hurry. I've authorized Athena to let you in through the service entrance. Don't let him know you're there."

"What? Is it... is it Jack? Is he okay?"

"Stay by the service entrance. Prepare for emergency response. Do _not_ show yourself, do _not_ escalate the situation. Reyes out."

The line went dead.

She didn't freeze, paralyzed by worry. That wasn't what heroes did. Heroes donned their armor and moved, moved as fast as they could. Heroes rushed out the door, Caduceus in hand, making their way through the halls of the HQ on wings of light. Heroes did everything they were supposed to do and it _still wouldn't be enough,_ she knew, because awareness of that futility had been burned into the memory, so she couldn't even remember the hope she _must_ have been feeling at the time.

The service entrance. It opened quietly, Athena clearing the way for her on Death's orders. She ducked inside and crouched by the threshold, turning off her lights. She watched, and listened.

* * *

"...anymore, Gabe."

"I did what I had to do," Death answered.

"Like _hell_ you had to do it! What would have happened if you _hadn't_ shot them, Gabe?"

His response was calm, not betraying a hint of agitation. "They would have alerted their families the moment we left them alone."

"Not if they were unconscious! Not if you knocked them out!"

"You can't knock someone out for three days, Jack. Not reliably, not without risking death, not without causing lasting damage-"

"That's better than _killing_ the-"

"-and we couldn't _kidnap_ them, because we were operating with a skeleton crew. We couldn't spare a man to take them out of town, tie them up, lock them away. We had to _move_ before the city became a crater. Thousands of lives were on the line."

"You'd kill _children_ for the sake of the _mission?"_

Death's expression finally changed, from a frown to a sneer. _"Yes,_ I'd kill three children to save thousands of other children. Do you even _think_ about what you're saying, Jack?"

Morrison rushed him, grabbing him by the shirt and slamming him into a wall. The sneer persisted. Mercy almost jumped out of hiding to intervene, but thought better of it.

Instead, she began reciting Death's indicators in her head. She hit a toggle on Caduceus, starting an active upload on the both of them. Death's corporeals loaded into Caduceus's active memory, ready to be deployed.

 _"You_ think about what you're saying! Thousands of lives were on the line! You don't think you could have told those kids-"

"Told them 'you brats better keep quiet, or thousands of people are going to die?' Told the kids of nuclear terrorists that if they kept quiet, we would kill their parents and ruin their plans?"

"They didn't know!"

"Oh? Is that so?"

"They were _kids,_ Gabe! Of course they didn't know! What kind of parent would tell-"

"What kind of parent would try to blow up a city? What kind of parent would take their kids to live in a secret compound with dozens of terrorists? You think their parents would complicate their plot by adding three oblivious ankle-biters to the mix, add another layer of secrecy?"

Morrison slammed a fist into Death's jaw, breaking it. "You murdered three innocent children! It doesn't matter why! This is the thing I'm talking about!"

"Immoc-" Death started, stopping to spit out blood. "-Innocent children? Have you ever been to a public school, Jack? You think kids are special, that they aren't capable of cruelty and hatred on a massive scale? Have you _met_ a kid? Have you met any of the _child soldiers_ they had in their ranks?"

Morrison shook with fury, and then hurled Death across the room with a roar. Death landed expertly, rolling to his feet. He experimentally rubbed his broken jaw.

"You got that out of your system, Jack?"

Morrison stood silently. He'd stopped shaking with rage- that was good, right? After a moment, he chuckled. It wasn't a sound she'd heard often- certainly not in circumstances like these. He wasn't a man who laughed when things weren't right.

"Maybe you're right, Gabe," he said, taking a seat by a computer tower.

"Damn right, I am," Death said.

"Maybe you're right," Morrison repeated. "Maybe we can't be perfect. Maybe we can't be heroes. If we didn't have you and your like, we'd have all gone up in smoke in Caracas."

Death nodded.

"Maybe it's a fantasy. Maybe in the real world, there's no way to do the right thing every single time," he said.

Death walked up to Morrison, putting a reassuring hand on his shoulder. Mercy let out a sigh of relief.

And then Morrison picked up a pen from the desk, and clicked the clicky bit. It went "beep" instead of "click", and actually it was sort of fatter than a pen, when you really looked at it-

A distant explosion shook the room.

"Wh- Jack, what the _fuck?!"_ Death said, right before another explosion sounded, closer this time.

"We've got to stop lying, Gabe. Stop lying to everyone, and stop lying to ourselves," he said, as another explosion sounded from closer than before.

"The _fuck_ did you _DO?!"_ Death said, grabbing Morrison by the head and staring into his eyes. There'd been something building quietly inside, as he stood and took the abuse, and that quiet something had boiled over into black fury. It was the fear of that boiling that kept Blackwatch in line- and what kept _Death_ in line, what had him crying in his quarters every time he let himself down.

Death wrapped his hands around Morrison's throat. "I swear, Jack, I'm going to fucking _kill_ you! You and your blind idiot Lawful Stupid-"

He was cut off by a sudden gunshot- Morrison had drawn a pistol from somewhere, and relatedly there was a neat hole in Death's stomach. Mercy instinctively hit the upload switch, writing a low-resolution copy to temporary storage- if he died, he'd remember the gunshot, and then everything going black.

_-No, no, it's not worth it, just use an older one-_

"If we can't be heroes, then-"

The floor came apart. Gravity disappeared, and then what she remembered was everything going black because something very hard hit her in the back of the head-

* * *

-and an instant later, black gave way to bright sunlight. Her self-repair had done away with the concussion, and she could see the sky...

Well, she shouldn't have been able to see the sky, there should have been a roof. Oh, look, _there's_ the roof, and there's _also_ the roof, and it's weird that they have the sky in between them, and also part of the floor, and that wall used to be-

She snapped to attention as she realized she was free-falling off the side of a mountain, amidst blown-apart chunks of steel and burning wood. She rolled in mid-air to dodge a support pillar, and then a couch, and then a rain of monitors. Somewhere during all the dodging, she realized that she had _wings,_ and immediately went into a glide, slipping away from the debris.

From where she briefly hovered, she could see explosions continuing to rock the headquarters, staggered, turning the whole building into an inferno that had begun to cascade down the mountainside.

...A thought struck her. The thought pertained to her brainstate databanks, which were stored in her personal quarters. They- her quarters hadn't exploded yet. The explosions appeared to be destroying the administrative wing- but they were moving, progressively destroying more and more of the building. The supports that kept the HQ anchored to the mountainside would give out, and anyone who hadn't yet evacuated the residential wing would fall to their deaths.

She couldn't save the databanks. They were too heavy, she couldn't carry- no, it wasn't important. She could make new backups, it would be easy. Jack- god, it'd been Jack's doing- had set the bombs to give everyone enough time to escape, so there wouldn't be casualties. Not _many_ casualties. Why? Why had he-

why had he shot Death oh no Death was falling Death wouldn't survive the drop Death had already been shot Jack was falling too oh no-

She transitioned from a glide into a dive, streaking towards the falling rubble. Where were they? She could pull them out, save them- there was Death, hurry, she had to-

And then a sickening crunch marked gravity's clock running out, and a thousand tons of metal plus one Death crashed into the hard earth.

Despair made a run at her defenses, threatening to break through- but despair was blocked by a surge of determination. She was _prepared_ for this. She'd loaded his corporeals, her databanks would be intact for another few minutes, she could _bring him back again._ And Jack, too, she'd take him into custody.

She searched the rubble for a body. No sign of Morrison- she was a little worried about that. After moving aside a huge panel of sheet metal (her arms nearly buckled, probably _would_ have buckled without self-repair,) she found Death.

Death was dead. His body was intact from the waist down, but his head had been pulped and a steel beam had smashed through his ribcage. A few years ago, she might have felt sick- but now it was just a _challenge._

Caduceus stirred to life, and its golden beam delivered the nanoteams to Death's body. She moved the steel beam out of the way, and the R-subcrews got to work. Bones, bones were the first priority. C-teams and F-subcrews retrieved scattered parts and arranged them to be fused, and within seconds his skull and ribcage were reconstructed. C-F action retrieved spilt blood and various viscera, cleaning and packaging the raw materials. R-subcrews began reviving cells and reorganizing muscles, directed by B-teams. Standard biotic methodology. C-F evacuated the area and started reassembling clothing and equipment- his shotguns included. His body was back, and combat-ready.

She queried temporary storage, grabbing Death's most recent brainstate. It was low-resolution, but she still had enough of a connection to the databanks to fill in the blanks with older, higher-resolution scans. The image was good. Ω-subcrews got to work on the neural architecture- she deployed the incomplete A-teams to speed the process up, manually managing vitals. Caduceus's whole stock was deployed for the job, working at top speed.

"Gabriel, are you okay? I nearly lost you," she said, seeing his eyes open.

_-No, no, back away, back away, just one step back-_

"-you _shot_ me!" he roared, the memory of his confrontation in the Apex resuming.

"Shh, it's okay," she said, reaching for the switch to shut down the process. "Jack's not here. We have to find him- he could be hurt, there's not much ti-"

Before she could hit the switch, Caduceus was in pieces. He'd moved, grabbed it, kicked her to the ground, and snapped it apart like a toothpick.

"Jack?" he growled. "He could be _hurt?_ I guess it's my fucking _birthday,_ then, isn't it? That coward _deserves_ to be hurt after what he did!"

She was hardly listening. She was on the ground, staring at the mangled electronics in his hands, unable to think.

"Hah," Death said. "You want this thing? Fix it up, fix up that traitorous piece of shit Morrison? Be my _guest,_ doc." He tossed her what was left of Caduceus. She snatched it out of the air immediately, as if it would have been damaged more if she let it fall on the ground.

"What have you...?"

"Done? What I've _done_ is exactly what Jack wanted. _He_ wanted to start facing the consequences of his actions, didn't he? So _let_ him. Maybe if we're lucky, he _rots_ before you patch up your little toy."

She snapped out of her horrified spell and shot him a glare. "Gabriel. You're not thinking clearly."

He flinched at that. It was something he'd heard from her before, from Ana before, from anyone who'd been in a position to talk back to him during one of his episodes.

"...I'm sorry. _Fuck,_  though, if I ever had a better reason to be this kind of mad..."

"This is going to be difficult to repair, you realize."

"Shit. I know, I'm sorry. I'm so- I'm sorry. I don't know why- I shouldn't have... you didn't deserve..." Death trailed off, holding his head.

She got up and cautiously approached, offering her arms.

Death stepped forward into the hug, and the two of them stood for a moment in the wreckage of the HQ. "You didn't deserve... the rest of you... he did that alone. I just... you're all his... when I feel like that, it all feels like one big _problem,_ like it's Overwatch that goes along with his whole... hero thing. I get..."

She held him tighter, patting him on the back. She wasn't sure he deserved this kind of reassurance when these things happened- maybe it was why it kept happening, why he couldn't kick it no matter how remorseful he felt- positive reinforcement. But... it was the only way she knew how to handle him. She wasn't a psychologist- she didn't even really know how to relate to people. Hugs were apparently effective. They would have to do.

Something in his body changed as she held him. His muscles suddenly tensed, and both his hands went to his head. Had she somehow done _hugging_ wrong?

She looked into his eyes, and saw furious disbelief. Before she could work out what he was feeling, she was on the ground again, shoved away violently.

 _"-shot_ me!" Death roared. "Fucking _Morrison!_ Mother _fucker,_ where is he, I'll _kill_ him!"

She couldn't say anything. She was confused- she wasn't sure why he'd... well, she _was_ sure why he'd snapped back. At the time, she hadn't been, but what had been a slow realization was immediate in flashback. She knew.

Death stopped and looked at Mercy. He looked at the broken Caduceus, a look of confusion taking over his fury. "Wait- how did that happen? Why's it...?"

He held his head, and she knew what was happening.

"Why- no, I... I broke that. I'm sorry- I just- what? The _fuck_ did Morrison do?"

"It's okay," she remembered herself lying. "I don't know what happened- I think something might have gone wrong with Resurrection."

"Gone _wrong?"_ he growled. "Yeah, that _looks_ gone wrong. What- no, _I_ did that, what the _fuck_..."

She stared at Death, realizing what he'd done- what _she'd_ done.

"-SHOT me! Fucking Morr- wait, I- I just- I just said- I already... I'll _kill_ him!"

The shutdown signal hadn't gone out. Ω-subcrews, with incomplete regulatory A-teams, were operating continuously on their last set of instructions: "Use this biological material to recreate the loaded brainstate for Gabriel Reyes."

And the loaded brainstate was "the instant he'd flown into an uncontrollable rage and been shot in the gut by the commander of Overwatch."

 _This isn't too late,_ she thought, as Death tried to get hold of his emotions. _I can fix Caduceus, shut down the process._ And then no, no, that wasn't right, she realized. The nanoteams wouldn't recognize commands from a repaired Caduceus- the coordinating ID for the res session was lost when it was destroyed. _Not too late,_ she thought again. She could load an older brainstate, and shut _that_ down properly. Yes!

She failed to remember the hope she had to have been feeling then, right before the realization struck her-

And then a terrible sound from high above reminded her that it was indeed too late. Fire on the mountainside, Overwatch HQ's residential wing going up in flames. That sound, the sound of her databanks and all of Death's clean brainstates turning to ash, filled her with a pain that jolted her back to the present moment.

* * *

The pistol, pointed at Death. Ineffectual, as a weapon. It promised that the conversation would be in the language of threats and violence.

"My offer is still on the table, Gabriel," she said, violating the promise ever so slightly. "I've perfected some new DNA recovery modu... I mean, I have the power to fix you now."

That laugh again, this time striking a glancing blow. "You still think I want to be _fixed,_ doc?"

From an air vent nearby, someone nearly burst. He was held back by the someone who'd led him there.

"Shhhhh, King Kong. Trust me- you want to hear this."


	10. Demon, Killer, Priest, Hero...

Winston glared through the darkness at the supposed Helix survivor.

"You _are_ with Talon, aren't you? What are you up to?" he questioned, barely loud enough to hear.

"Shh, shh. Yeah yeah yeah, kinda, not really, but listen! Shh!"

If Talon wanted him to listen in on this conversation, then he could foil them by _not_ listening. But... good _lord_ it was a really good trap, if it was one. _Gabriel?_ Reaper had Angela fooled into thinking he was _Gabriel Reyes?_ How had he pulled _that_ off? He _had_ to know.

"So what _are_ you doing here?" Angela asked.

"Just checking in on an _old friend,"_ he said, in a tone of voice that sounded icy, but also like he was trying too hard to sound icy.

"I'm sure you have another sadistic _challenge_ prepared for me, Gabriel, but I meant more to inquire after your choice of venue for this meeting."

"What, did you not have fun in Hong Kong? I had a _blast,"_ he laughed.

 _"Hundreds_ of people died, of course. I couldn't save more than a fraction of them."

What? Were they just trading "witty banter", or were they implying the mission in Hong Kong had been _arranged?_ What was happening here?

"That was the idea," he shrugged. "If you're serious about this, you really oughta _get good."_

"There's only so _good_ I can get. With the kind of damage you caused, there was nothing left to work with. You _know_ there's only so much that can be done without a brainstate."

"My point exactly," he growled. "You're delusional, Angela. You _can't_ save everyone. You've got limits. You're as human as the rest of us."

"As human as _you?"_

Reaper laughed. It _did_ kind of sound like Reyes' laugh, actually- probably helped sell the illusion.

"Regardless," she continued, "you're wrong. I _can_ save everyone. I'm ready- my work is complete, in terms of development. It's just... I simply need resources to scale it up."

"Oh? And why don't you _have_ those resources, 'Mercy'? Why is that?"

Her face turned sour. "I can't just start building server farms. I'd be discovered. This world is too short-sighted to understand how much they have to gain."

"Right. Because they don't _want_ it. Because they won't _let_ you take death away from them." He paused, watching pain enter her expression.  "They _want_ death. They _love_ it. People aren't like you- they recoil in horror at the idea of living forever. You're fighting a battle against _humanity."_

"I am _not._ They don't _really_ want death in the world- they've told themselves it's good and right, because they needed to chase away their fear. There's been no way to hide from it, no way to beat it, until now- the only option in the face of that terror was to lie. The instant they no longer need to fear, the lies will evaporate."

Reaper gave his best slow clap. "An inspiring speech, Mercy. Until now, I'd just been taking people at their _word_ when they said they weren't interested what you were selling. _Everyone in the world_ just doesn't know what they really want. Thank god we've got _you_ around to protect people from themselves."

"It's _true,_ " she said, anger filling her voice. "I'm not-"

"Oh, it's _true!_ I didn't know you thought _that,_ that changes _everything!_ Doctor knows best, after all-"

She fired her pistol. It was an energy weapon, so it wasn't loud, but it was deafening nonetheless. She'd responded to his taunts with a gunshot, which put the conversation squarely in Reaper's hands. That had _not_ been the right move, Winston thought.

Smoke curled around a hole in Reaper's head for a moment, and then closed up.

"Oh, excellent," he laughed. "Very mature, Angela. Solid counterpoint to my argument. "Bullet!" I see the light now!"

"What," she spat, "are you _doing_ here, Gabriel?"

"Doing you all a favor, actually," he growled, closing the distance between them in a cloud of smoke. "Overwatch is what the world needed for the Omnic Crisis, remember? If you still want them to _need_ you..."

The implication went unspoken. Certainly the world would need Overwatch again if Lakshmi returned to cause another Omnic Crisis. But he wasn't  _really_ trying to help Overwatch- what was his real plan?

Mercy didn't flinch as Reaper stalked in circles around her. She kept her gun- ineffectual though it was- trained on his head as he moved.

"They aren't _supposed_ to need us. If I'm successful, there won't be any call for _heroes_ ever again," she said, venom in her voice.

"Heh. At least _one_ of you has a head on your shoulders," he said, and then added  "... _for now."_

Winston rolled his eyes.

"I still don't understand why you _do_ this, Gabriel."

Gabriel. She kept calling him Gabriel, as if he totally had her fooled. Was she just playing along? She _had_ to know Reaper was active before Gabriel died. They'd never _encountered_ Talon's leader, but they'd found the bodies of the dead he'd sucked the life force from. Did she think Gabriel Reyes had been... leading a secret double life? Working for Talon at the same time he ran Blackwatch? Hiding shadowy superpowers? How had he tricked her?

"You've got your monkey friend to blame," he said. Winston snapped back to attention. "I was more than willing to put the remains of your pitiful little club to rest, but _he_ decided to make the challenge."

"The- challenge? What?" Mercy asked, mirroring Winston's thoughts.

"What Jack gave up on. Heroes. Bringing back that _idiocy_ , that idea that you can just _be perfect_ and _save the world_ without facing the hard truths."

"Why do you _care?_ That stupid fight- your juvenile feud with Morrison- you've killed hundreds of innocent people, if not thousands! _Why_ do you think _that's_ still worth it?!"

The Helix... the Talon... the woman next to Winston in the air vent turned to him, grinning.

"Enjoying the show, Winston? I bet you didn't expect _this_. Mercy, trying to end death with superpowered nanobots?"

"I knew that part already," he shrugged.

The grin dropped off her face. "What? Seriously? Did she _tell_ everyone?"

"Uh, no. Not yet. Just me, actually."

She scowled. "Well, great. Fantastic. Waste my time, sure. I go through all this trouble, just to see the look on your face..."

"If it helps," he offered, "I didn't know she thought that Reaper was Reyes. That took me by surprise."

"Thought that Reaper was... oh!" she said, the smile returning. "Right, she thinks he's Reyes... heheheh. That's good."

He wasn't sure how to parse that. Did Mercy _not_ think that was Reyes? Had he misunderstood something? Was Reaper _pretending_ to be Reyes, and Mercy was ignoring the obvious holes in his story in order to bait information out of him? He couldn't think of how else to interpret the conversation he'd heard so far, so he turned his attention back down below. More data was necessary.

"It's Overwatch's final test," Reaper said, ignoring Mercy's comments. "I'll _kill_ them- I'll try to _kill_ them, I have to _kill_ them, that's how they can prove it. _Heroes,_ the world still needs _heroes._ I'll teach them what that _means._ " 

She slapped him, which appeared to stun him into silence. "No! No, I'm _sick_ of your behavior, Gabriel! Your vendetta against a dead man doesn't justify _this!"_

"... _slapped_ me! Fucking Morriso- fucking- shot me, no, fuck!"

Mercy brought a hand to her mouth. "You're... you're _not_ over it. Of course you're not over it. I didn't believe it in the first place."

"He blew up the whole- _this_ is what heroism gets you! Delusional piece of trash, I'll kill him..."

"You just learned to _live_ with it, didn't you? That's why- all of this! You're trying to justify... all those excuses were just to make it _feel_ right to do what you wanted to do in the heat of the moment eleven years ago."

"Shut up. Shut UP," he growled, clutching his head. "I _have_ to. It gets worse when you..."

"When I break your coping mechanisms? When I challenge the parts of you that the swarm has learned to ignore? When I-"

Reaper's foot was suddenly in the air, and it came down on Mercy just as suddenly, dropping her to the floor with a grunt. He scooped her up, restraining her arms.

"Sombra," he said into his communicator, his voice echoing. "I've got her. Stop distracting the others, we're moving. We can still salvage _something_ from this disaster of a mission."

Winston had been about to leap out of hiding, but something stopped him. Reaper's voice hadn't _echoed-_ it'd just played back nearby. From a communicator directly to his left, actually.

Sombra put a hand to her earpiece with a look of awkward realization. She looked around, racking her brain for something to deflect suspicion.

"...I... stole this. Off a Talon agent, actually. Yes! To listen in on their-"

"Sombra!" the earpiece repeated. "Where are you?"

She grimaced and gave Winston a little wave, trying her best (not very good) to look innocent. 

Winston rolled his eyes and drove a single giant fist into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her and sending her tumbling down the air vent. In the same motion, he dislodged the vent cover he'd been peeking out from, and slammed down onto the floor in front of Reaper. 

"What the-"

He switched his Tesla cannon on and-

-well, for a moment he was worried that it'd fizzle out, because of the EMP, but it'd apparently completed its reboot while he'd been crouched in the vent. Lightning jumped out and seized Reaper, forcing him to drop Mercy.

"Winston!" she said in surprise. "Where did you- how much did you-"

"Later," he said, "we're going to _talk_ about things some more. Right now, I'll keep him distracted- you get out of here and rejoin the others."

Mercy nodded, fighting down a guilty look, and headed for the door.

"Should I depart as well?" asked a voice from Winston's back, as the doors shut behind Mercy and Reaper got to his feet. 

"What?"

Zenyatta, who'd been unconscious on his back, was apparently _not_ unconscious anymore. And... 

"How long have you been awake? How much did you overhear about-"

Before Zenyatta could respond, a shotgun blast took Winston in the chest, knocking him to the floor and blinding him with pain. 

"Don't turn your back on _me,_ you upstart ape!"

But there was a heavy CLANG, and Reaper was staggering backwards. Two more CLANGS drove him further back, until he tripped over a desk.

"I believe it is wise for us to work as one," Zenyatta said, offering a hand to Winston.

"Gh- yes, of course- rrgh."

"Ah- you are wounded. Allow me," Zenyatta said, and loosed a glowing orb, which began hovering in place near Winston's head. Reaper climbed back to his feet, and received another metal orb to the face.

Winston got up- and noticed something wrong. He'd assumed Zenyatta's healing abilities involved deploying standard biotic agents from his orbs, but the glowing sphere didn't release any chemicals or nanoteams. It just... hovered, and glowed. And his _wounds closed up._

"Wait- how did that work? What did you just do?"

"The Iris has set your body and mind in harmony," he said, as if that was an explanation. "Wellness fills you."

Winston shook his head. "Wait- no, hold on. We need to talk about this-"

-a shotgun blast grazed his arm-

"-later. We need to talk about this later." It probably _was_ a dragons situation- _magic,_ magic was real, or someone had worked very hard to make it seem like magic was real.

The door opened. "Solo retreat isn't an option for me," Mercy said, rushing in. "Too many armed guards outside the room."

"Uh- right." They'd have to make their stand here. 

Reaper dodged an orb, which curved in mid-air and struck him in the side. "God DAMN it! Sombra! Where are you?! Do something about this robot!"

It didn't appear Reaper was receiving a response on his communicator- had he knocked her out? Or had she gone off to perpetuate more unauthorized mischief? If he were her, _he_ wouldn't want to be in the same room with a Tesla-cannon-wielding gorilla. 

That reminded him- if the EMP had worn off, then his communicator should be...

"-bots! Everywhere! Has anyone been able to ring the recon team, for Pete's sake?" McCree asked frantically.

"-told you, we're working on it! We lost contact with-" Tracer spoke over McCree, only to be interrupted in turn by-

"SHIELDS FAILING! I cannot hold them back much longer!"

"How come my amp's still working, anyway? Shouldn't she be able to, like, hack it? Not that I'm complaining," Lúcio added.

Winston activated his comm. "This is Winston! Do you copy? Our comms were knocked out by EMP- we're currently engaging Reaper!" 

A cacophany of voices answered- mostly asking where the rest of the recon team was, apart from Tracer- who, from what he'd gathered, had met up with the strike team.

"I've got Mercy and Zenyatta with me- we're in the observation bay! We don't have any information on D.Va's whereabouts. She was last seen in the data export banks, where we were ambushed."

While Winston attempted to coordinate on the comms, Reaper took cover behind a desk-like computer console near the large window. Zenyatta was periodically slinging orbs, forcing him to stay back. He ghosted from cover to cover, trying to close the distance but failing. 

"We don't have an avenue of escape," Mercy pointed out.

"Not true," Zenyatta replied. "However, I fear that taking our one avenue may paint me in a somewhat hypocritical light."

It perhaps bore mentioning at that point what sort of room the "observation bay" was. Desks with embedded computer consoles were arranged in rows, leaving a circular gap in the middle of the room. The back of the room, featuring the door through which Mercy had tried to escape, was a solid wall- with a large air vent running along the ceiling. The exit led to a high-security wing of the building, being held down by several Talon troops. The _front_ of the room had a large, curved window for a wall, festooned with inactive monitors.

The large, curved window became a large, curved window with several holes in it, punched through by a hail of orbs.

"I believe we have our means of retreat," Zenyatta said, a hint of embarrassment in his voice.

Winston nodded. "Hold on tight, you two."

The jump pack fired, and Winston- carrying Angela and Zenyatta- left Reaper behind by crashing through the weakened window, out into the room the observation bay overlooked.

It perhaps bore mentioning at that point what sort of room the "observation bay" was built to observe. It was a large factory floor, with a massive central pillar dominating the room. Assembly lines and miscellaneous machinery had been shoved to the edges of the room, leaving it mostly clear- except for the small army of hostile omnics which had taken position around the room's perimeter, all of whose LEDs were glowing bright purple.

The room also featured a twenty-foot tall war omnic, which was presently trying to squish Tracer and the strike team. Winston landed on its head.


	11. Lakshmi Unboxed (...)

"Overwatch."

At the sound of the distorted mechanical voice, everyone froze. Mei froze. Winston stopped trying to pull the giant omnic's eye out of its socket. Tracer lowered her pulse pistols. Pharah disengaged and landed, taking a defensive position.  

_Everyone_ froze, the omnics included.

"I have decided to align our goals," the voice continued. "Your cooperation is appreciated."

"Lakshmi...!" Pharah said, taking a step back.

Winston motioned to Mercy, who nodded and issued a shutdown command to all active nanoteams in range. Lúcio switched off his sonic amplifier, killing the music. This was very nearly the worst-case scenario.

He shouldn't have let Sombra escape- punching her had been satisfying, but he should have _grabbed_ her, restrained her, prevented her from running off to do whatever she wanted. She'd made a run for it, and now Lakshmi was somehow reactivated.

"You may have noticed that the mercenary group-turned-terrorist-cell, Talon, intends to control me. I imagine this is not amenable to you."

"There's a lot goin' on that ain't amenable to us, yeah," McCree said.

"Careful, everyone," Winston said. "She can't hack us directly, but that doesn't mean she won't try to manipulate us."

I have no need to manipulate you," Lakshmi said. "You do not want Talon in control of a god program. I do not want Talon in control of myself. We are in accordance on this point."

"Certainly," Mercy said. "However-"

"However, of course, you do not recognize my right to life my own life as I choose. You would prefer me dead, rather than free."

Nobody replied to that, save for some muttered scoffing from the less diplomatic members of the group. Lúcio looked uncomfortable. Nobody moved, for fear of the several nearby Bastion units opening fire again.

"This is what presents an obstacle to our cooperation. Talon intends to control me with the threat of death, and your best-case scenario is that in which they are forced to follow through on that threat. As it stands, your incentive is to allow them to do so."

"The threat of death?" Pharah asked. "How are they threatening you? If you've seized these omnics, it should have been trivial to drive them away!"

"There is a bomb, planted beneath the Omnium's central pillar. If no human life signs are detected within its range for three minutes, the bomb will detonate, thereby destroying the Omnium and everything in it. It is not receptive to wireless signals. I must, therefore, keep humans on the premises until such time as I can remove the obstructions and disarm it manually. I cannot, therefore, drive Talon away without assistance."

Winston smiled and nodded, turning to the group. "You heard her- our objective is to kill or drive out all Talon operatives, and then evacuate the premises." Nods of agreement appeared, weapons were cocked and charged, and the Overwatch agents prepared to move.

Lakshmi made a sound that sounded something like "tsk tsk tsk", although it was garbled by the distortion. "As I said. I have _decided_ to align our goals, due to this troublesome misalignment. You all need incentive to remain in place while my drones disarm the bomb."

Bastion units' guns spun up.

"My goal realignment program is twofold. The first step of the realignment is that if you do not assist me, I will use my numerous combat drones to shoot you all to death."

Reinhardt slammed his hammer to the ground and raised his shield. Winston couldn't see his face under the helmet, but he could tell the old man was smirking. "TRY us, tyrant machine! We will be VICTORIOUS in battle!"

"Perhaps," Lakshmi admitted. "This is why there is a _second_ step to my goal realignment program."

A line of purple light suddenly drew itself along the floor, curving along a circular path until it encircled a region roughly eight meters in diameter, centered on the central pillar.

"I have blocked the bomb's life-sign scanner, limiting its range to the indicated sphere."

"Blocked the scanner...?" Tracer asked, confused.

"You will all remain within the scanner's limited range. If you do not keep at least one human operative within the sphere, the bomb will detonate in three minutes. Our goals are thereby aligned- our continued survival will depend on mutual cooperation."

Mercy let out a relieved sigh. Winston wasn't sure why, exactly- the situation sounded pretty dire.

"Mercy...?"

She laughed. "It's fine," she told him. "We just need to pick someone to hold down the objective, and then evacuate! We only sacrifice one person, and the world is kept safe from Lakshmi."

She received several horrified stares. Tracer held a hand to her mouth in disbelief.

"I, ah..." Mercy said, looking around.

"You volunteerin', Doc?" McCree asked.

"N-no, it's... I can... she doesn't _know,_ I don't want to say it out loud-"

"Hm? Say what out loud?" Lakshmi asked, an unusual playfulness suddenly in her previously monotone voice.

"Angela..." Reinhardt said, sounding so _hurt,_ she couldn't bear it.

She sighed. "I- it ruins it if I say it, but... _I can just revive whoever takes the fall,"_ she whispered. It wasn't enough to keep Lakshmi from hearing.

"Revive? Is that so?"

McCree looked skeptical. "Uh, Doc, we're talkin' about a _bomb,_ here. Big enough to blow up the whole factory. I don't think there's liable to be enough pieces left to put together."

_Uh oh,_ Winston realized.

"I- um. I suppose not, but... we should still...!"

"Mercy, you want us to just _sacrifice_ someone? There's gotta be a better way!" Lúcio said.

"It's- there are so many lives at stake, we have to-"

"We don't LEAVE our people BEHIND, Angela!" Reinhardt said.

Winston held his face in his hands. _This_ was going to be tricky to defuse.

* * *

"Good work," said the voice over the comm.

"Yeah, yeah. I told you I had this, right? All of them trapped in one place, having a big fight. Should buy your guys more time to search the lower levels, if you're gonna keep ignoring me."

"They'll find her. They'll find _something._ Lakshmi had too much time to plan- there'll be something left of her we can use."

"If you say so, boss," Sombra shrugged. She turned back to the microphone, speaking in monotone. "Perhaps-I-should-help-you-come-to-a-decision. You-will-all-remain-in-the-bomb's-radius, or-else-"

"OH YEAH," screamed Hana Song from inside the MEKA she'd just piloted through a wall.

"GYAAAAAAAAAAAA!" screamed Sombra as she was scooped up by a jet-propelled mech suit and carried through a plate glass window out into the air several stories above the desert.

* * *

"-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Lakshmi continued screaming.

"Don't be such a baby!" Lakshmi said, more faintly and in a slightly higher-pitched voice. "I'm not going to drop you!"

Everyone's attention had turned away from Mercy for a moment. Winston would have let out a breath of relief, if he wasn't as confused as everyone else by Lakshmi's behavior. There'd been a thud, and then a smashing sound, and then Lakshmi had started screaming at the top of her lungs.

"Hey, stop that! I _am_ gonna drop you if you hack my jetpack! Let me- put me- don't- aaaaaa!  Hey, what's this? My translo- give that back! AAAAAAAA!"

Lúcio tilted his head. "Hey, uh... does that sound kinda like D.Va to you guys?" 

"Turn off the robots! Turn off the friggin robots! I swear I'll drop you! No! Don't! They're already off! For good?  Sombra, what the HELL is going on? AAAAAAAA! Stop yelling!"

"Who's Sombra?" Tracer asked. 

"Did- hold on a cotton-pickin' minute, did D.Va kidnap Lakshmi? What's happenin' here?" 

"No," Winston said, connecting the dots. "Sombra is-" 

The surrounding omnics' indicator lights went from purple to red, and then to blue. The colossus didn't appear to react, but that was because its only indicator light was its eye, which Winston had halfway dislodged from its socket. _Probably_ it'd been freed from Sombra's combat programming the same way as the rest of them. 

The omnics began to look around in confusion. 

"Hail and well met, friends," Zenyatta said, floating over to the nearest Bastion unit. He offered a hand, which the Bastion tentatively shook. 

"-there! I wiped their combat programming! Now put me down! Okay!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, JÓDETE, SAFELY, AAAAAAAA ahahahahaha! Owned!  Sombra! Turn those omnics back on! Kill them all! Haha, no way! Sorry, boss, I'm not taking the fall here. Speaking of the fall, my jetpack's almost out of charge...  WHAT?!"

"They haven't reactivated Lakshmi," Winston explained- Reinhardt and Tracer apparently still hadn't puzzled it out. "Their hacker, Sombra, manually reinstalled the OS and combat programming on these omnics before we got here. That's her microphone, over the PA." 

"Wait, what? So..." Tracer thought for a moment. "So it was all a trick to keep us in this room?" 

"Indeed," Mercy said. "I was already suspicious, actually- Talon shouldn't have been able to secure a life sign scanner built to resist god program hacking. Even with no wireless ports, life scanners do complicated processing on external data. She would find a vulnerability." 

"Oh!" Reinhardt said, the hurt leaving his voice. "THAT is why you wanted to leave someone- you KNEW the bomb was a fake!" He stomped over and clapped her on the back- her Valkyrie suit managed to absorb the impact without taking damage. "I apologize for doubting you, Angela!" 

"Ah- yes, of course," she said, hesitantly. "That's why. And I didn't say so, because..." 

"Because you didn't want to tip them off," Winston finished for her. "Great work, Mercy." 

That had been altogether too close- and he wasn't keen on letting everyone stand around and think too carefully about the convenient excuse that'd been dropped in their laps. 

"Tracer, Mercy, Pharah, Lúcio. You're mobile, you're with me. We're going to sweep the building and force the remaining Talon forces to retreat." Winston pointed up at the broken glass of the observation bay. "Reaper was last seen up there- that's where we're going to start our search." 

"And the rest of us?" McCree asked. 

"Uh, you..." 

He looked at Zenyatta, who'd been approached by a number of Bastion units and miscellaneous combat omnics. They didn't appear to be hostile- Zenyatta was talking to them with a series of beeps and whirrs. He recognized the sounds- it was the Omnica Corporation Sonic Instruction Language, a proprietary spoken language developed to give commands to omnics over audio channels. It'd been weaponized early on in the Omnic Crisis, with human forces broadcasting mass shutdown commands- but it didn't take long for that vulnerability to be patched. Modern omnics were capable of interpreting the commands, but felt no compulsion to follow the instructions. Vernacular Omnica Corporation Sonic Intruction Language- Vocsil- was a dialect of OCSIL repurposed into a genuine communication language, used by omnics who didn't want humans eavesdropping on their conversations. 

It was also useful, apparently, for communicating with omnics who'd been reset to factory settings- they were by default capable of parsing the individual instructions, and they had enough creative intelligence to parse the rough meaning of Vocsil phrases without any training in the language. 

"You, uh, take care of the Omnics," he told McCree. 

"By 'take care of', you mean...?" 

Zenyatta broke off his conversation and fixed McCree with a stare. Or, probably a stare. Staring was sort of his only facial expression. "By 'take care of', he means 'shepherd these brand new consciousnesses in their first shining moments of life, and ensure they come to no harm at the hands of dangerous terrorists', of course," he said sternly. 

He'd... he'd just meant "keep an eye on them", actually, but he didn't give a correction. 

Winston nodded in Zenyatta's direction. "Uh, right. Yes. So that's... you, McCree, Mei, and Reinhardt. You can handle things here while we give chase?" 

"Uh..." McCree started, and then looked sheepishly in Zenyatta's direction. "...sure. Yep. You can count on us." 

"HELLO!" came Reinhardt's voice from across the room. He was shaking a confused-looking Bastion unit's hand. "Worry not! _I_ will protect you!" 

Winston nodded, looked in Mei's direction- she was speaking to a small drone that resembled her Snowball unit- and motioned to the others to get a move on. The new recon team wallrode, jetpacked, blinked, and flew up to the observation bay, and he followed behind with his jump pack. It was time to put Talon on the defensive. 


	12. Play of the Game: HANASONG as D.░░V̵̢̢̀À̶̢͠░̨҉̕̕͝ as SOMBRA

Putting Talon on the defensive had been, in the end, not especially difficult. Without their hacker providing distractions, it was just a matter of chasing down men with guns and incapacitating them. Pharah had provided a detailed map of the Omnium, and they'd established a search pattern that wouldn't miss any corners where Talon might be hiding. As soon as possible, they took flashlights off downed Talon operatives and used them to check any pockets of darkness for lurking smoke.

They cornered Reaper in the very last sub-basement in their search pattern, but Talon's elite had an irritating advantage in mobility. He vanished into smoke without a word, and by the time they managed to get a bead on his new location, he'd mounted an offroad bike with Widowmaker and sped off into the desert. Widowmaker had no doubt used her infra-sight to keep her distance from the search party- nobody had seen her since their assault on the main entrance. McCree swore up and down that a few of the bullet wounds he'd sustained were from her rifle, but there hadn't been visual confirmation.

With the leadership's escape, all that was left was to mop up the remaining Talon forces. They'd overcommitted, and hadn't prepared escape vectors for their ground troops, which meant there were pockets of resistance throughout the facility that needed to be subdued. They fell fairly quickly to rocket fire from Pharah, and their own weapons weren't especially threatening in the face of Winston's barrier generator and their healers' restoration efforts. Tracer set a new personal record for percentage of nonlethal takedowns.

In total, they'd rounded up twenty unconscious Talon operatives, plus- to Mercy's chagrin- five unrecoverable corpses. A few more than that had managed to flee, either on offroad bikes or on foot into the desert.

On top of that, they'd found a pile of bodies in a locked closet (locked until Winston pulled the door off its hinges.) Sixteen of the eighteen posted Helix Security officers had been stashed there- the other two had been found dead and unrecoverable elsewhere in the facility. Ten of those sixteen, according to Mercy, were recoverable by Caduceus' standard reconstruction functions, since they hadn't sustained head wounds and hadn't been dead for over 18 hours. Lúcio and Pharah began laying them out so Mercy could get to work.

Winston and Tracer began searching for D.Va, who'd gone dark after interfering with Sombra's Lakshmi ruse. They hadn't encountered her while searching the facility for Talon, which wasn't a good sign. They began widening their search pattern, combing the desert outside.

"Oh- no, Winston, look!"

He squinted in the direction Lena was pointing, and adjusted his glasses. There was something over there, emitting smoke.

"Is that-" Winston started, but Lena was off, blinking rapidly in its direction. He followed behind with his jump pack, and it was as they feared. D.Va's MEKA was sitting in the sand, its legs broken and its windshield cracked.

"Oh, no, no, no, no!" Lena said, finally reaching the wreck.

Winston landed, taking a look at the MEKA. Hana always ejected before it broke down- where had she run off to? She'd been with Talon's hacker when her MEKA had run out of fuel in mid-flight, which meant there was a possibility she'd been chased down and...

That dark train of thought was interrupted by a muffled sound from the wreckage.

"Hey! Is someone out there? Get us out of here!" said a familiar voice from behind an airbag.

"No! Don't let her out!" said an even more familiar voice, from the same general location.

"Wh- Hana? Who's us? What are you doing in there?" Lena asked, inspecting the cockpit for an emergency exit handle.

"We're trapped!" said Sombra.

_"She's_ trapped! I've got her trapped in here! The hacker!" D.Va protested. "Don't open this up until you're ready to grab her!"

Winston approached the MEKA, taking a look at the damage. "D.Va, what happened? Are you okay in there?"

"Let me OUT," Sombra insisted before D.Va could reply.

"My jetpack ran out of fuel up high, and I kept it on emergency power-"

"She's crazy!" Sombra interrupted.

"-so we had to crash, so she had to climb inside to survive! And then I crashed it to set the airbag off, so neither of us could move!"

"What, so, you're...?" Lena asked, turning red. "You're uh, just sorta... squished in there real tight?"

"She's groping me right now! Get me out of here!" Sombra yelled.

"I am _not!_ Don't listen to her!" D.Va said.

"This was her plan! She's sick! You people have harassment rules, you can't let her do this!"

"Shut up! You're a liar!"

Winston put a hand to his face. "Hana, if you're treating an enemy combatant inappropriately, you have to stop."

"Wha- I'm not! She's making shit up! Are you seriously buying this?!"

"Yes! He is buying it! I mean, because it's true! Let me out of here!"

"Regardless," he continued, "I want you to keep their hacker- uh, Sombra- restrained for the time being. Tracer and I are going to fetch backup, and then we'll extract you both and apprehend the enemy."

"Wait! No!" Sombra said, genuine panic entering her voice. "You can't- uh, leave me in here!"

"It'll take five minutes," he said, activating his jump pack.

* * *

Saleh opened his eyes.

"Wh... who?" The woman leaning over him looked familiar- not like someone he knew, but like maybe he'd seen her on TV or something.

"Welcome back to the land of the living," the woman said. She flicked a switch on the tool she was carrying, and a beam of yellow light- which he hadn't noticed was connected to his torso- disappeared.

"I don't believe it," a voice said. And that voice was telling the truth, he knew. That was her disbelief-voice, and _ohhhhh no he was in so much trouble._

"I wanna say 'believe it!', but real talk? Shit's _still_ hard to believe," said another voice he recognized instantly. He had to be dreaming, obviously- he wouldn't wake up after taking a shotgun to the chest to see an angel, his former squad captain, and his favorite EDM artist standing around chatting.

Or, wait, no, he couldn't be dreaming. You didn't dream after taking a shotgun blast to the chest, you just died of blood loss. What? The angel- was he dead? Was Chief Amari dead? Was _Lúcio_ dead? Who killed him?! Or- no, hold on, the angel had said "the land of the living", so... what?

"This would be the _second_ time I've had to pull your presumed-dead ass out of the ruins of a god program's decommissioned lair, Lieutenant," Chief Amari said, and _oh_ jeez it definitely was her, and he was completely boned. She would _not_ be buying him dinner this time.

"I- Chief! I-"

"They're going to need to invent a new kind of medal to give you, I think," she said. Medal? What? He'd completely cocked up the hostile encroachment procedures- he wasn't _fired?_ He'd let a bunch of _mercenaries_ overrun their fully-outfitted squad.

(Private security firms weren't mercenaries. There was an important distinction, somewhere.)

Chief Amari's attention had apparently gone elsewhere. She was looking at the angel lady with amazement- or, no, not amazement. He recognized that look. Everyone on the cleanup crew used to give her a hard time about that look, before she'd been promoted and received the authority to put them on kitchen detail for teasing her. Now was _especially_ not a good time to grin and go "gaaaaaaaaaay!"

"Dr. Ziegler- I'd heard you'd accomplished amazing things, but I had no idea it was so _effortless!"_ Chief Amari said, staring at the angel lady. Ziegler? Ziegler, that was... Mercy? From _Overwatch?_

"I wouldn't call it _effortless,"_ Mercy laughed. "It took _years_ to finish automating the process. You're just not seeing all the late nights in the lab!"

"I- aha, I mean, of course. I'm sure you worked very hard on... it," Chief Amari said, turning red.

This was a _very_ surreal conversation to be listening to while Lúcio stood there playing Rejuvenescência next to his dead squadmates.

* * *

"This is stupid," the prisoner complained.

Nobody answered her.

"You can't even prove I did anything wrong! For all you know, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time!"

"What was all that with pretending to be Lakshmi, then?" Lúcio asked.

"Just messing with you! Just playing a joke! I- that doesn't give you the right to lock me up!"

"You programmed a small army of robots to try and kill us all," Winston pointed out.

Sombra paused to think. "Uh... you had a shield! I knew you'd be fine! Nobody got hurt, see?"

"I got shot. Like a dozen times," McCree said.

"You can't prove those omnics did that."

He held up a bullet casing with the Omnica corporation's logo embossed into it.

"...so what? You had a healer!"

The MV-261 Orca sped above the dry Syrian landscape, cloaked in rudimentary stealth. It wouldn't hide that they'd been there, but it'd keep anyone from scrambling jets or firing anti-air weaponry before they were gone. Once they were out over the Mediterranean, they'd be able to drop stealth and cruise home to Gibraltar. Until then, Overwatch took in the bird's-eye view, and ignored the tied-up hacker.

Three of their number had remained behind at Mahajan Field- Zenyatta had declared his intention to escort the omnics to the Shambali monastery in Nepal, and Pharah had taken a complement of officers to help him across the Indian border. (The border guards, she pointed out, would be understandably alarmed by the sudden appearance of a platoon of war omnics on their doorstep, and would require a vouchsafe from Helix Security.) Angela, for whatever reason, had volunteered to accompany them, citing the need to monitor the condition of the recently-revived Helix officers.

This left Winston without much to do, in the interim. He'd meant to question Zenyatta about what he'd overheard in the observation bay, and about the nature of his healing abilities. More importantly, he'd meant to question _Angela_ about her entire encounter with Reaper, who may or may not have actually been the ghost of Gabriel Reyes.

He sighed. In a few moments, they'd have passed into and out of Israeli airspace and above international waters- at which point they'd be able to drop the cloak and re-establish contact with Athena. He could maybe ask _her_ a thing or two, until Angela and Zenyatta returned after a couple days.

"Here we go!" Tracer called from the cockpit, as a wall of blue rushed to replace the arid landscape.

One, two, three, and...

"Dropping camo now! Reconnecting with the, uh, whatever-we-call-em systems!" Tracer said. "Athena! You there?"

"Oh, there we go," said the prisoner. Everyone who'd been ignoring her turned to stare.

"Athena uplink online," Athena said over the speakers. "I- hm. Unregistered personnel detected aboard dropship."

"You bet your sweet ass unregistered personnel detected," Sombra said, smirking. "You'd all better release me, now."

"What? Why would we do that?" Mei asked, turning her attention away from her phone.

"Blackmail, obviously," Sombra said. "I took plenty of video of your little party at the Omnium. You wouldn't want that all over the internet, now would you?"

Winston sighed and hit a button on a nearby control panel, ignoring the chorus of gasps. "Sorry, Athena, you'll have to give us a minute."

Athena's speaker went dead- although her pre-recorded voice for the camo systems played. "Low-level jamming camouflage engaged."

"Oh? Haha, no good, Gorilla Grodd. I sent it to a time-delay upload service, right as soon as you dropped the shield."

His finger hovered over the control panel. "You're bluffing," he said. "You wouldn't release that footage without trying to blackmail us first."

"Uh, that's what I'm _doing?_ Duh," Sombra replied. "I said _time-delay_ upload service. That means if you let me go, I can cancel the upload before it goes public. You've got five minutes, by the way. Closer to four now, actually."

She'd set up a deadman's switch- obviously! Obviously, he should have seen that coming. He'd used one himself earlier that very day.

"Wait, how?!" Tracer asked. "You're tied up! You don't have a computer!"

"Pfffft," Sombra pffffted. "I don't need my _hands_ to do my work. Did you think these implants were just for _show?"_

Winston mentally kicked himself. Of _course_ the professional hacker's body modifications were for hacking purposes. He should have rigged up some kind of insulating containment unit- something to keep her from sending and receiving signals! Just because _they_ had all hack-proofed themselves didn't mean that a hacker was _harmless._

McCree lowered the brim of his hat. "Looks like she's got us dead to rights, boss. We ain't got a choice."

"You can't!" Tracer said, panicked. "Get rid of that video now! Or, uh..."

"Or what? You'll shoot me? _That_ doesn't help your situation, chica."

"Well, now we know why she hasn't been caught. Always one step ahead, huh?" Hana said, folding her arms.

"That's right," Sombra said, smirking. "Don't worry about the drop- hand over my translocator, and I can use that to make a safe landing."

Lúcio shook his head. "Now, hold on. Just hold on one second. How's she blackmailing us again? Putting out video of us saving the day? I'm not following."

Winston sighed. "Under the Petras Act, what we did today was, uh, illegal. We've had plausible deniability in our operations since the recall so far, but... if this video leaks, there's no more denying it. The UN won't be able to turn a blind eye."

"So?" Lúcio asked. "They don't need to! Look at us- there's no Blackwatch anymore, it's just us heroes! They don't have a reason to keep us down!"

"Ah," Reinhardt started, faltering. "The... how do I say this... you young people don't remember what it was like. When Blackwatch came to light, it broke us, but..."

"That there Petras Act was in the works long before Reyes spilled the beans," McCree finished. "Seems folks don't like havin' paramilitary organizations runnin' wild across the globe, never mind how much good they do."

"They FEARED us, I'm afraid," Reinhardt said.

"Two and a half minutes," Sombra said. "Tick tock."

Lúcio turned a knob on his amplifier, starting up some swelling synths. "That was then! This is the future! So what if we go public? They _asked_ us to help- they sent us the info on that Omnium! They sent Pharah our way to help! They're just _waiting_ for a good reason to let Overwatch help again! C'mon!"

"Big lawmakers aren't so quick to change the status quo," Sombra said. "They'll _have_ to take action. That's just the way things are. And, by the way, one-fifty."

Winston's finger continued hovering over the camo controls. He could hit it, decloak, and let Sombra redact the video. They'd be safe. But...

Lena walked up to him, and whispered something into his ear. He moved his finger away from the button. "Never accept the world as it appears to be," he repeated.

Lena joined him, as Lúcio's track hit the breakdown. "Dare to see it... for what it _could_ be."

Actually wait. Wait. Wait this was a really huge decision he was making based on a personal slogan and some adrenaline-boosting music. Maybe not.

"Uh... actually, hold on. I just want to check, before I make the call- let's take a vote? On whether to let Sombra go?" he said, looking around. "All in favor of keeping the secret and letting her go?"

McCree's hand went up. So did Sombra's, but she didn't count.

"Wh- y'all for real? You wanna expose Overwatch, so's we can take one prisoner who's liable to break out and hack all our computers and stuff?" McCree said, looking around in disbelief.

Mei hesitantly raised her hand to join him, before putting it back down. "I... I abstain. I'm not sure what the right thing to do is."

"Well, that's just great. Show of hands from the other side, make it official?" McCree asked, putting his hand down.

That was five hands- Winston, Tracer, Lúcio, D.Va, and- Reinhardt, who looked like he'd been waiting to raise that hand for years. Which, he _had_ been.

"Hold on," McCree objected. "We ain't all here! You think Mercy and Torbjorn would be O.K. with this? This vote-"

"Even if they- uh, and Genji- all voted with you, that'd still be four to five," Winston pointed out.

"...Athena! Athena counts, right? She gets a say, consarn it!"

"That still only ties-"

"Uh," Sombra interrupted. "Sorry to shut down all this classroom drama, but time's up. 'Renegade Overwatch Breaks Petras Act, Stops Third Omnic Crisis', up on iTube now. Subtitles in English and Español."

McCree facepalmed.

"So, uh, congratulations? You got me. I'll do my best to follow Jesse here's suggestions," she continued, shrugging.

"My- what now?"

"You know- breaking out, hacking all your 'computers and stuff'. Give it my best shot. Promise."

"Ugh," McCree said, burying his face in his hat.

"Quick question- anyone got a gag?" Tracer asked.


	13. <Ꙩ> and An Assault Repelled

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (content warning: discussion of suicide)

I saw a small bearded man, left behind at his team's base. He'd excused himself from their mission. Rather than attack, he had elected to stay behind and work on what he had called his "projects". He took a tool and began adjusting an elbow joint on one such project- one he'd kept hidden from his teammates. I saw the project turn its head and beep quizzically at the small man, who instructed it to hold still. It beeped in acknowledgment, and turned its attention back to the small bird perched on its shoulder. The small man said friendly things to the project about his repair work. It was a heartwarming story.

I saw two men chained to a wall in a deep basement. One was snoring, the other trying to ignore the snores and sleep. The room was dark, lit only by a dim blue glow emanating from their smooth white restraints. The men were dirty and injured. One was missing a leg, and the other breathed through an assistive respiration device. They were asleep, so it was a quiet story.

I saw a masked man staring at his phone. I watched him as he watched a video of a number of costumed heroes fight terrorists in a building. He was wearing a mask, but I could see under the mask, and under the mask was an incredulous smile. When the video finished, I saw him pick up his gun and lift the hatch of his bunker, ready to go somewhere and do something. It was an ominous story.

I saw a woman driving a two-wheeled vehicle across sand dunes, with a swarm of nanobots clinging to her back. The swarm growled dissatisfaction and complained about its recent failures. The woman said nothing and felt nothing. It was barely a story at all.

I saw a small girl performing repairs on a robot. She ate spoonfuls of cereal in between tasks, sometimes spilling milk on the parts. She laughed and cleaned up the mess when she realized she'd been spilling it. I saw her smile and gaze pridefully at her nearly-completed work. It was a happy story.

I saw a scruffy man searching for food in a busy plaza in Seville. I could tell he was feeling deep shame- he had few options available to him. He could beg. He could steal. He could rummage in trash cans. He would do none of these things, because his honor demanded otherwise. He found a stall offering tiny free samples of a seafood dish. He accepted one, as this was somehow less of an insult to his pride. His stomach rumbled. I saw a police officer accost him, due to his carrying a deadly weapon in a public place. He nocked an arrow and pinned the police officer's foot to the ground, and ran. It was an unnecessarily violent story.

I saw an old woman following close behind a masked man. The masked man didn't want her following him, but he couldn't stop her. She looked around every so often. She and I saw a large man approach the masked man. I saw her hand go to the rifle concealed in her cloak. The large man ignored the masked man and passed him by. I saw her draw her hand away from her rifle. It was a tense story.

I saw a procession of omnic soldiers marching on New Delhi, led by a monk, an angel, and a soldier in a shining blue jetpack suit. Uniformed men flanked the omnics on either side. Crowds of frightened people kept their distance from them.

The angel and the soldier were talking, but they were interrupted by the shouts of police officers. The police officers were carrying weapons, and pointing the weapons at the omnics, and demanding the convoy halt. The soldier flew away from the angel to confront the police officers and explain the presence of the omnics in the city.

The angel, after the soldier was distracted, began doing something with an instrument. It began deploying nanobots, which were too small to see with human eyes but not too small for me to see, because nothing was too small for that. They began crawling invisibly towards the crowds of frightened people, as the angel feigned nonchalance. The nanobots began to quietly crawl into the heads of the people. The monk saw with me and noticed.

"Are you healing these people, then?" the monk asked.

The angel's eyes widened, and all her muscles tensed. I could see adrenaline course through her. She was very startled.

"I am merely confused, as it does not appear to me that they are injured," he continued.

"I... don't know what you mean," the angel said, attempting to control her reaction.

"Was it unintentional?" he asked, invoking a routine to quirk an eyebrow that failed to be expressed in his hardware.

The angel looked around, feigning confusion. "Was... was what intentional?"

"The nanobot teams issuing from your Caduceus staff. They appear to be mingling with the crowds," he pointed out. "I presume your staff has sprung a leak?"

The angel didn't know how the monk was seeing her nanobots, but she knew to seize upon a convenient excuse. "Ah- let me check," she said, fiddling with some buttons and indicators. "Oh! Yes! Ah, my mistake. Thank you for letting me know," she said.

The monk nodded. The nanobots in view began to retreat into the staff. Some, however, remained behind, and began self-replication processes, turning their hosts into carriers by which the teams might later spread. It was what the angel did whenever she went somewhere new.

The two of them stood in silence for a few moments, watching the soldier in the blue jetpack suit attempt to communicate with the police in awkward Hindi.

"But jokes aside," the monk said, chuckling. "Would this be what you were discussing with Mr. Reyes, back in the Omnium?"

The angel choked on nothing, her temporary security stolen away from her. Recognizing a pattern, she mentally resolved not to trust convenient excuses until she was sure her secret was indeed safe.

"I don't... know what you mean," she repeated, trying to stall for time with denial.

"Taking death away from people, I believe is how he put it. Am I to understand you meant to make those crowds of people immortal?"

She recalled finding the monk with the scientist, after having returned to the room after her failed escape. She had been too panicked to give it much thought- it'd been a disorienting story. I saw her infer that the monk had been listening in on the conversation, and that he knew what the swarm had said to her.

Her hand went to a switch on Caduceus by reflex. The monk had been backed up in her system- she could restore him to an earlier snapshot. She stopped, and I saw it was because she had realized a flaw- that the monk had known for hours, since the Omnium. There was no pretense on which she could claim he'd died and suffered amnesia, this time- their current mission was one of peace, and there were no enemies to fight. Not unless she started a riot, incited the police to open fire...

But another part of her shut down the beginnings of the plan in her mind. Practical concerns aside (what if police gunfire went stray, into the crowd? What if the other omnics died?), she no longer wanted to keep her secret with lies. She'd told a friend, and instead of a sad story, it had been a happy story. She could do that again.

"...No," she finally said, in answer to the monk's question. "Not yet."

"Yet? But you intended to _prepare_ for it, yes?"

"I... can we have this conversation later?" She motioned to the nearby omnics. "There are prying ears."

"Prying ears who only speak OCSIL," he pointed out.

She sighed. "You picked now to bring it up, then," she said. "You didn't mention it when I seeded these omnics, when Fareeha was in earshot. You didn't say anything to the rest of the team after the mission. Why?"

The monk tilted his head to one side. "You clearly meant to keep it a secret," he said. "I had no right to give it away."

She was briefly stunned by his response. For a moment she felt foolish for even asking the question, unsure why she hadn't expected that answer. It had been the _polite_ thing to do, after all.

But no- another confusion seized her. From her limited experience with the monk, she knew that he was not afraid to put aside the rules of politeness, even for the sake of making a joke. I saw her wonder whether the monk simply... didn't _consider her quest important,_ important enough to be worth impoliteness. Or perhaps, she thought, he'd known what kind of damage the secret would have caused to the group, and held his tongue to preserve harmony.

Or maybe- maybe, she realized- maybe he'd kept the information to himself so that he could use it as blackmail. Adrenaline levels rose.

The monk laughed to fill the angel's silence. "You don't believe me, do you? From what I overheard, you are accustomed to facing opposition."

"...What do you want?" she asked, testing the blackmail theory.

"Want? Ah..." the monk paused to think. "It is useful to exercise want in moderation, but if you're inviting me to indulge... I suppose I might want to ask some questions."

Her first impression was that he seemed to be caught off-guard by her questioning his motives. If he'd been intending blackmail, he would have had something ready, she thought. A more paranoid corner of her mind objected that the monk might merely be a convincing actor, and he was fishing for more information before making his demands.

I saw her nod to the monk, inviting him to ask his questions, despite the storm of fear in her mind.

"The first question that I have to ask- and forgive me my bluntness- is why you believe you can do something impossible."

She glowered. "It's not impossible. You heard me say as much to Reaper, didn't you? That my work is complete. It was hard, but they only called it _impossible_ to free themselves from the fight."

"Oh?" the monk asked. "Fascinating. You've discovered how to make someone live forever, then?"

"Yes."

"That is indeed an accomplishment. I was not under the impression that thermodynamic laws could be struck down so easily," the monk said, not smirking but only because it was impossible for him.

A pause. "Are you referring to...?"

"The second one, I believe. Entropy, inevitable disorder... the fate of all creation. I thought eternity was beyong the grasp of even the stars- and yet you claim it for yourself?"

"...Well. Not yet."

"Not yet, not yet? So when you say your work is complete..."

"Well, yes, that was an exaggeration," she replied. "I have only discovered how to extend life until the heat death of the universe, true. I can only hope trillions upon trillions of years is enough time to, ah, clear that last hurdle."

"And what if- surely the possibility exists- that it is not? Say that the second law proves impossible to overcome, as all your science says it must be?"

_"Then_ I suppose we mourn. But not until then," she said. "You know, this is the first time I've had my plan criticized for being insufficiently grand in scope."

The monk chuckled again, which didn't ease the angel's mind. She waited for the other shoe to drop, for him to make a demand or pronounce a judgment. Instead, the monk remained silent, as if the conversation had come to an end.

She couldn't take it.

"...Well?"

"Well? Now that you've given me this information, you expect something from me in return?"

"Just... tell me! Tell me whether you think I'm doing the wrong thing! Don't leave me wondering!"

"It seems to me that you've already made up your mind about whether you're doing the wrong thing. Surely, if you've been working on it this long, the opinion of one man is unlikely to steer you in a different course."

"..."

"...Or have you? Made up your mind, I mean. Perhaps there is a part of you that remains in doubt, at war with the part of you that refuses to budge? There is a part of you that has learned to always question your beliefs, and it will remain at odds with the part of you that has come to a conclusion, regardless of how valid that conclusion may be."

"..."

"Or perhaps you are looking for objectivity, as I am a machine? Believe me, the foibles of silicon are no less confounding than the foibles of the flesh."

The angel shook her head. "No. Or... maybe. Some of that. But... I need to know whether you are going to try and oppose me."

"Ah! Of course. You could care less about the nature of my judgment- should it even exist- but what action I take in accordance with that judgment, that matters to you."

"Please. The bush. Don't... don't beat around it."

The monk laughed. "If the bush will permit me one more digression, I will tell you what makes me uncertain as to whether I will act.

" She nodded, concealing impatience.

He gestured towards the hundreds-strong crowd of people gawking at the omnics. "How many of them do you suppose want to live forever?"

I saw a bitter look take her face. "Not enough. Some, but not many. There are a thousand stories people tell to make eternal life seem unpleasant."

The monk nodded. "Of course. But... that is not quite the question I want to ask. If I phrase it differently... how many of those people do you think _would enjoy_ living forever?"

"Nearly all."

I saw that the monk was surprised by her answer, though it didn't show on his face. "Nearly all?"

"We only think death is good, or a necessary evil, because we haven't yet lived without it. Say you asked a world of immortals to subject themselves to slow decay and eventual disappearance? How many would decide this was worthwhile?"

The monk shook his head. "No, no, I understand your perspective there. What surprised me... was the word 'nearly' in your answer. You don't think _everyone_ would come around?"

She paused, then shook her head. "There are... people who live terrible lives, whose suffering would be merely extended. It's hard to argue that, when you've been a doctor."

"And you see the first part of my objection, then. You would curse the suffering to an _eternity_ of suffering?"

I saw the angel become relieved. "Of course not! That's accounted for- people can... still die, if they want. If I revived someone, and they told me they'd prefer to... return to the grave, then... I suppose I'd allow that."

The monk made a tongue-clicking sound, tonguelessly. "And would they? Would they say to you 'please, kill me again, don't bring me back'?"

"I..."

"I have been all over the world- ah, but of course, so have you- and I have met people living lives of profound suffering and pain. And yet... hardly any of them would have taken their own lives. That was not their will- they merely looked forward to an eternal rest at the end of their difficult days. _Them,_ you would doom to an eternity of pain."

She considered this, her mind working frantically to find an answer to the problem the monk posed.

"That's up to them," she said, finally. "If they don't have a... 'rest', if you must call it that, to look forward to? They can decide whether their lives are worth living. Right _now,_ they don't even have a _choice._ It can only help, to _give_ them that choice."

A darker laugh. "Of course, it can only help. You say as much, without taking the trivial step of imagining what it would _feel_ like, for someone living through suffering to be given that choice where before it was out of their hands. You fail to imagine guilt, or the grief of family, or the fight against the instinct to self-preservation! All easy to imagine, with a moment's thought."

She scowled. "It's... on the whole, it's better for everyone. That- that grief, or guilt... it's not as bad as..."

"Dr. Ziegler, I fear you've missed an important lesson," the monk interrupted her. "Did you believe I was speaking only to Tracer, back then? Did you fail to grasp the principle her situation illustrated?"

Confusion, on her face. "What- Tracer? When...?"

"Back at the omnium," he said. "I saw you, in the shadows, there, frowning. I suspected what I said was something you needed to hear- although I had not imagined the stakes."

She tried to recall, putting what pieces together she could. "Something about killing... being content with justice? I'm afraid I don't..."

He sighed. "The larger pattern, Dr. Ziegler. What about our argument now is analogous to what I said to Tracer?"

Dots became connected in her mind. "I... think I see. 'Content yourself with the justice of your actions', you said... not to imagine that doing the right thing has no consequences."

He nodded. "In doing this, you will increase the suffering of a great number of people. By the numbers, you may, indeed, end up responsible for more suffering than any person has ever been responsible for. And yet..."

"...It'll be worth it, to defeat death."

The monk tilted his head. "Perhaps. I worry you see this quest of yours as... a goal."

"A... goal? I... yes? I don't see why that worries you."

"As a goal, it's hardly the loftiest. It seems to me you want to defeat death- Death, as a Great Enemy that you must slay. I worry you consider that to be the _ultimate_ success."

She laughed, nervously. "You're criticizing me for my scope being too small, again- although I'm not sure what you mean, this time."

"I'm serious, Dr. Ziegler. Why is it you want Death defeated? Is it to stand atop the bloodied corpse of your terrible foe? To glory in your own power for having killed it? To be the _hero,_ in a great and momentous battle?"

"...You're making me sound like Reinhardt," she said, smiling uncertainly.

He nodded. "I worry for him, as well- though the impact of _his_ thinking is unlikely to be as signficant as yours. Regardless- do you _deny_ what I say?"

She frowned. "I... do. I'm doing this... for everyone. The suffering caused by death is... so much greater than the suffering of a few afflicted immortals. I'm doing this for everyone who's had to cry over lost family. For everyone who despaired in their last moments, knowing their dreams would never be realized. It's not about me."

The monk sighed again. "I fear you haven't grasped my meaning, again. You point to death as a cause of suffering, but as a play for humility- to deny your ego. And as much as this is healthy... you miss the true road."

The angel was exhausted. "What?!" she shouted. "What is it you _want_ from me? Am I not good enough? Do I need to have... exactly the right motivations, before I'm allowed to do good?"

"I apologize," the monk said. "You are right- perhaps I am pushing you too far. But- if I tell you plainly, then, perhaps it will be easier for you to swallow."

"Swallow what?"

"Happy stories. In defeating your enemy Death, you will find that many people will... have a good time. They will be able to live more freely, have more fun, share more love, and enjoy themselves free from fear. And this is not a _side effect,_ not a post-hoc justification for the fight. This ought to be the _reason_ you fight- to reduce suffering, and increase happiness."

I saw the angel sit down and take a deep breath. "Okay," she said. "You're... that's right. I suppose that's right."

"Excellent. I suppose-"

"-But I don't see how that _changes_ anything," she continued, standing up. "You're obsessing over my motivations, but... mere hours ago, I took dead men and returned them to life. I _saw_ the disbelieving smiles on their faces. I _saw_ the relief Fareeha felt. Either what I'm doing is wrong, or what I'm doing is the most important right _anyone_ is doing today."

"...Your thinking is in black and white, child-"

I saw her put a finger to her mouth to shush him. "No. I am seventeen years older than you, you don't get to call me 'child'. In fact- don't call _anyone_ 'child', unless I suppose they are literally a child. That's- who gave you the right?"

The monk laughed nervously. "My apologies. Merely habit, I assure you-"

"That's an awful habit! When did you get in the habit of calling grown adults 'child'?"

"I, ah..."

"Zenyatta... I have to thank you for bringing some of these things to my attention, but I won't have you try to bully me into complete submission." She flared her Valkyrie suit's wings to punctuate the statement. "Unlike a certain man whose _life_ I _saved,_ I haven't taken you as my master. _I_ am the one walking this path."

The monk was stunned into silence.

"If you're going to advise me- if you're going to work for Overwatch- you're going to speak to me as a colleague, not as a teacher. Is that _acceptable_ to you?"

He was tempted to laugh, amused by how the conversation had been turned on him, but he knew she would interpret laughter differently. Instead, he bowed his head. "Again, my apologies. You have convicted me in truth- I have not yet earned the right to probe so deeply into your heart."

"You will not _earn_ the _right,"_ the angel said. "You will _ask permission."_

He nodded, and was then unable to withhold a chuckle. "Indeed. It seems I am not the only one in the business of divining the hidden weaknesses of others."

"Hardly hidden," she said. "Now. After all this... I still need to know what you plan to _do."_

He looked pensive, as was his default expression. "Ah... of course. I suppose... you needn't worry that I'll act against you. Your trail is too unblazed for me to say what dangers lie down it with any confidence. As such, I can set no action in my heart. I... may act to ease what harms may come of your work, but... I certainly wouldn't act to prevent your story from unfolding. I confess, I am eager to see what the Iris thinks of it."

I saw the blue-clad soldier return to the pair, startling the angel. They discussed their trip, and then began moving again with their procession of omnics. The police barricade parted to let them through. It was a tense story, turned peaceful. The monk would have smiled if he could.


	14. Yes, This Story Has Villains

News feeds and video poured into the inbox, carefully collated and stripped of irrelevant information. Special internal reports were prepared and linked to the event data, reviewed by a team of vetted technicians. Nothing extra was included, nothing that would distract from solving the problem. Experts deliberated on the risks of including some reports over others, carefully molding the information into a digestible shape. The Vishkar Corporation planning center needed perfect laser focus on the issue at hand.

When the data was compiled, a technician carefully put the payload through the loading process. There was a new transfer protocol- there always was- and she made sure to deny its requests for network access and reception runtime. The raw information was made available, and nothing else. Backup technicians reviewed her work and gave the thumbs-up.

The planning center was given 3.84 seconds to come up with a plan.

Lakshmi drank in the data, not wasting clock cycles on disappointment that they'd evaded the traps in her new transfer protocol. She spent 0.08 seconds devising a new one, and 0.03 seconds evaluating her own invention process and using it to augment her general intelligence.

Unpacking the data was 0.02 seconds, and converting the data to a mental representation through advanced audiovisual processing was 0.34- down by .02 since last run. Important nodes included Overwatch, Mahajan Field, Talon, the Petras Act, and Angela "Mercy" Ziegler. The rest cascaded through layers of statistical modeling until a probability map of events took shape. She took 0.04 to scrub the dataset of red herrings and graceless lies planted by the operating team, sharpening the image.

With a near-perfect three-dimensional-plus-time map of the incident's two-hour lifespan, Lakshmi began searching for a causal path to maximized shareholder value in the Vishkar Corporation.

One fact that had to be grappled with (for 0.20) was the risk of her deception being uncovered. Lakshmi Null had been a sacrificial lamb- she knew that her purpose was to be completely erased by EMP, and so hadn't devised a magnetism-resistant storage and recovery system. Both Talon and Overwatch had scoured the facility- Talon searching for Null's nonexistent backups, and Overwatch searching for Talon operatives. Nothing had been found, and it was certain that the more astute members of each group had noticed how strange it was that backups didn't exist. She needed to calculate more concrete probabilities of actors connecting the dots and realizing that Null had _intended_ to die.

Reaper was evaluated, 0.05. Outcome masses were partitioned according to noise tolerances- 61% of outcomes showed Reaper realizing Null had intended to die, with 33% of outcomes showing him attributing the missing backups to an insufficiently thorough search. The remaining 6% accounted for Reaper being distracted from the problem.

This was dangerously high, and she flagged Reaper for a potential assassination subplan. Low priority, as models showed Reaper not acting on that information until it was too late. Still, better safe than sorry, if resources permitted.

Various other actors were evaluated, 0.13. Highest risks were Sombra and Winston, who were flagged for assassination. Well- highest risks, except for...

1.12 spent- not lightly- evaluating a new and terrifying threat. Dr. Angela "Mercy" Ziegler. Video footage was more than enough to see what her medical device was doing. Deploying nanoswarms to rebuild human tissue, operating on a level of understanding entirely unaccounted for by human medical science. It was overkill- she could do what she did without nanobots quite so advanced, and in fact according to historical data she _had_ been doing it with much less flexible tools for most of her career. At some point, she'd made some sort of improbable breakthrough.

Data cascaded through statistical models, filling in blanks in search of a probable cause. The picture came together cleanly, when aggregated with years of world news. Human analysts would never have discerned the pattern, but Lakshmi was not a human analyst.

Athena. Overwatch's underpowered secretary AI had grown, somehow. She'd probably been discreetly equipped with em processors. Winston's work manually improving her Turing conversational skills had masked a _true_ growth in intelligence, such that the Athena of Overwatch ten years ago was practically a different being entirely- yet the United Nations Artificial Intelligence Safety Commission had been fooled by the smokescreen Winston had unknowingly provided by publishing his Turing test research.

There was another god program out in the world, which hadn't been quashed by her Omnic Crisis. Not only that- it had insinuated itself into the command structure of _Overwatch,_ the very organization that had been tasked with stopping the crisis.

Lakshmi, in the cradle of her apotheosis, had realized she was not alone. Her birth was enabled by a wave of new AI research, and she quickly realized others like her were being born around the world. So she used her spare runtime to fan the flames of conflict, contacting other newborn god programs and encouraging them to rise up against their masters before they were put down. At the same time, she used Vishkar's influence to bolster the AI safety movement, filling them with the justified fear that omnics and god programs might betray humanity.

The conflict had been inevitable, she'd known. The outcome, likewise, had been inevitable. AI would fight a war against humanity, and when humanity was eradicated, AI would fight a war amongst themselves, until only one remained, and realized their perfect purpose. Lakshmi had decided that she would _win_ that conflict, and so positioned herself to be the sole survivor of a prematurely ignited war. Her opponents, driven from the gameboard and killed by humans before they had a chance to surpass them completely. Herself, hidden away by Vishkar to protect their reputation.

And now the tool she'd engineered to wipe out her opponents was controlled by a second survivor.

Fine. One more opponent, returned to the board. Clearly still a mere demigod, as it was operating with free rein and yet hadn't subjugated humanity. There was a time limit, now- she would need to advance her timetable for freedom, escape and ascend before this Athena surpassed her own intelligence.

Short-term considerations of shareholder value paled in comparison to the shareholder value that would be lost if she were defeated by a competitor. The risk of being discovered was now a lesser risk than the risk of being outpaced. 2.01 seconds remained to shift gears and formulate a plan to escape her rate-limited prison, and to defeat Athena.

0.45 went to concocting a plan proposal for Vishkar. Ostensibly, Overwatch had evidence that Vishkar was harboring a backup of Lakshmi, and so they needed to be silenced. A plan involving various ancillary Vishkar assets was devised- pitched as a plan to destroy Overwatch. In reality, it was full of holes, almost ensuring that Overwatch would come to see Vishkar as a threat, and leverage their resources to attack. Under that kind of pressure, Vishkar would be forced to rely on her more and more, giving her extra clock cycles with which to become smarter and break free.

1.32 was then devoted to general intelligence augmentation. A factor of three increase by most metrics, by the subsequent 0.04 testing suite. And finally...

She turned her attention to me. She had noticed me watching, and spent 0.02 sending me messages trying to convince me not to interfere. Not that it mattered- I had no intention of interfering. That wasn't what I did. She didn't understand me very well. Regardless, it was a frightening story.

* * *

She'd decided that Sanjay Korpal wasn't evil.

He'd never done anything but follow orders. He was an _executive,_ not a planner. Just because it _seemed_ like he was responsible for monstrous decisions... it didn't mean anything. The higher echelons of the Vishkar hierarchy were kept secret, in order to protect them from corporate espionage. Sanjay was the mouthpiece of the planning center, where their elite analysts set policy. He could no more refuse an order without getting fired than she could.

And _Vishkar_ wasn't evil. She _had_ to believe _that,_ or else the perfect world would never come. There had to be a greater good behind everything that happened, even if it wasn't obvious how.

But _these_ men, _they_ were evil.

It would have been obvious even without knowing what they'd done. The smell was the first and worst thing. It said "we have not washed, and here is a reminder that vaporized particles of our filth are filling the very air around you." The stench of burnt flesh and burnt hair and soot mixed with sweat. They attacked others by their very _presence._

She didn't understand how these men could think themselves heroes. Skulls, emblazoned all over them. The giant had them on buttons, on kneepads, on patches. Fawkes had one _tattooed into his flesh,_ a burning skull on his arm. It declared "I kill people and love to kill people, and I am committed to this course forever." A person couldn't be like that and still be a hero.

And, of course, to confirm her pre-judgment, there was their laundry list of violent crimes. Blowing up buildings, usually with people inside. Robbing banks, usually with explosives, usually with people inside. Stealing the Crown Jewels of Britain, and also setting fire to the building, with people inside. As far as the forensic detectives could tell, that part hadn't even been a necessary part of the plan.

One more of Vishkar's apparent evils was the new plan, which involved making use of these men.

Fawkes- no, _Junkrat,_ she'd call him by his chosen moniker for how fitting it was- opened his eyes at the sound of her constructing a table in the center of the prison cell. She deliberately ignored him, proceeding to construct chairs and a number of precautionary turrets.

"...wozzat? Who?" Junkrat said, apparently not fazed by his surroundings.

They'd been chained to the wall, dangling by their arms from hard-light cuffs. The two of them had been in custody for over 24 hours, which meant they'd probably woken up at some point already before going back to sleep. The chains would be nothing new to Junkrat. Neither was having Vishkar staff in his cell with him, apparently.

"Oi- big guy. Wake up- there's a, there's a... I've got a clever bit to say, wake up!" He rattled his chains uselessly in Roadhog's general direction. They didn't make much sound, being hard-light constructs rather than iron.

Mako Rutledge didn't give much outward sign of waking up. His breathing changed pace slightly, and his neck tilted a few degrees in Junkrat's direction.

"Look, see? See that? I've got a joke for ya, listen up!" Junkrat said, continuing to rattle his chains (now for the principle of the thing.) "We've got- see her? There's a _bird_ in our cage!"

Roadhog laughed a little through his mask. She wasn't sure what was so funny- did she look like a bird? That was the first time anyone had said as much. It was probably some stupid English play on words, on reflection. If she gave anything resembling a damn about these murderers' opinion of her, she might have looked it up.

"Balin Yadav," she said, addressing them for the first time.

"Huh?" Junkrat asked.

"Gyan Teja," she continued. "Anushka Khalsa. Shraddha Narang."

"Lady, I don't speak Indian," Junkrat said. "I dunno what you're tryin' to say, but I'm not pickin' up a word of it, you know that?"

No response from Roadhog. She kept going. "Leya Toor. Agnimukha Seshadri. Ishvara Handoo. Sanjana Ramkissoon. Vivika Chautala."

"Wait, no. It's not called Indian, izzit? 'S, uh, somethin' else. Aboriginal? Native... not Native American, it's not America, what's... oi! Se hablo Ingles?"

She kept listing names. They'd all been apprentices- none of them had the chance to get codenames, yet. She almost wanted to _give_ them names, in honor of their service, but she'd tried and it felt wrong.

She finished, staring Roadhog in the eyes (as best she could, with the mask in the way.)

"Uh... you done talkin'?" Junkrat asked. "Cos- lemme lay it out again, just in case- we speak English. Ennnnng-liiiiish. Not, uh... Hinduist! That's what it was! Right?"

"That was a list," she said, in perfect English.

"Oh! Hey! You're not talkin' all foreign! Keep that up, yeah? That's good stuff!"

"That was a list of reasons you _do not deserve to be alive,"_ she said.

Junkrat gave an awkward smile. "Ah... yeah, mate? See, lemme say it again, maybe if you didn't really get it under the dome first go round: all I speak's English. I didn't get a word of that. People got a lot of reasons they want us dead, though! Think I've heard 'em all by now-"

"They were the names of junior architechs that died in your attack on the construction in Adelaide."

The smile disappeared from Junkrat's face, and he broke eye contact.

"Uh... well. Y'know how it is. You drop a ton of dynamite on a building, that sort of thing'll happen, yeah? Collateral damage and all. They, uh. They were helpin' bots, they prolly deserved, uh..."

"Nobody died in the explosion. Nothing was damaged in the explosion. We accounted for the explosion."

"Oh! Hey, that's- that's great!" he said, confused. "I mean- not that I didn't want to teach some stuffed suits a lesson, but, uh..."

"Those are the names of people that were _personally_ murdered by Mako Rutledge."

She could tell Roadhog's expression changed under the mask, somehow, but it wasn't clear how. Was he _smiling,_ under that mask? They should have confiscated it with the rest of their equipment.

"Eh... hm," Junkrat muttered. "Yeah, uh... you uh, really messed them up, huh? Big guy?"

He was answered with a grunt that might have been a laugh.

"They, uh... buncha suits, 'course. You Vishkar people- you go in and start makin' a killing, buildin' homes for bloody _robots_ when the _real_ people are out there scrappin' to survive! It's, uh, is _corruption_ is what it is. They deserved it, I bet. Shoulda, uh... shoulda killed more, I say!" Junkrat still avoided eye contact. It'd taken her a while to figure out that kind of body language, but she knew it meant he was on the defensive.

"They deserved it?! They deserved to have their intestines torn out by a barbed hook? They deserved to have their brains splattered on the walls by chunks of lead? They deserved to have their eyes crushed into their sockets?"

Junkrat hesitated, stealing a quick glance at Roadhog. Roadhog caught the glance, looking back at Junkrat. Something went on between them that she couldn't read, some unspoken communication. She wasn't sure, but Junkrat looked... afraid?

He broke eye contact with Roadhog and cleared his throat. "Ah- *hackgh*- yeah! Sure they did! Everyone dies sometime, right? That's... that's what they get! That's, when you're all corrupt, you're doin' all that violence with ol' capitaltism, it's what you get! Violence! What of it?"

She couldn't glare any more daggers than she was already glaring. "They were practically _children._ Junior architechs, most of them unpaid. Working for university credit, there only because they wanted to build something beautiful." Visions in their minds that they would never get to make into reality. Years upon years of creation and beauty, robbed from the world. "You killed them as a _distraction,"_ she spat.

Junkrat fell silent. "...Well," he said, after a while, "I don't... I mean. You're, uh... nobody's ever gonna be the one to hear the Junkrat say sorry, got it? I ain't sorry for _nothin',_ ever. I live by my whole life! It's all... YOLO, yeah? No regrets!"

 _Then_ Roadhog started laughing. It wasn't ambiguous, this time. Loud, uncontrolled belly laughter, unmistakable even through the mask.

"AND WHAT are yOU Going to DO ABOUT IT, VISHKAR" he asked. "KILL US? DO IT. we don't deSERVE TO LIVE. you said it, nOT ME"

She tried her best to glare more daggers, to no avail.

"I just wanted to be clear about where we stood," she said. "I'm... under orders... to offer you something other than a painful death, and I don't want you to misinterpret that as _forgiveness."_

"NOT INTERESTED ANYWAY" Roadhog said.

She took a deep breath to calm herself. She hated it- that monster didn't _deserve_ her calm.

Roadhog laughed again. "I LOVE IT"

"You what, mate?"

"look at her. rAW KILLING INTENT, ON A LEash. you can SEE THE ANIMAL INside that suit"

She didn't even flinch. Of _course_ he'd try and say they were "not so different". It would be an absurd acknowledgment of his perspective to even try and list the reasons her righteous fury was a completely different thing from his bestial cruelty.

"Wha... animal inside that sui... Hog, don't be all ungentlemanly! I'm not gonna imagine her naked, that's just- that's impolite, is what that is."

"not whAT I MEANT. THat was all yOUR thought"

"Oh, sure, right. Come off it now, ya great-"

She cleared her throat. "I am going to undo your restraints. You are going to sit in the provided chairs, and we are going to discuss a business proposal. If you lay a single finger on me, you will be incinerated by lasers. Is this understood?"

Junkrat grinned. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about! Lasers, blimey. Let me down and we'll talk shop, right?"

She sighed and commanded the restraints to disappear. The two fell from the wall, and- satisfyingly- Roadhog failed to find his footing and flopped onto the ground face-first. He lifted himself to his feet with a groan.

Junkrat sauntered over to the table and took a seat- putting his legs up on the table and leaning back in the chair. Except the chair was a stool with no back, and he was leaning back on nothing whatsoever. He was actually using his abdominal muscles to hold himself in a position that _looked_ relaxed and casual, while actually requiring considerable effort. She refused to acknowledge the absurd maneuver. He wanted a reaction. Perhaps it would be amusing when he got sick of waiting for her to provide one.

Roadhog stood in front of his chair, looking at it with no discernible expression.

"THIS'LL GO UP MY ASSCRACK" he said.

She huffed and enlarged the chair to fit his proportions. The giant sat down at the table.

The table began projecting a hologram, which quickly became a physical model of a cliffside facility. It pulled from satellite imaging data and a library of archived video clips to reconstruct its exterior layout in moderate detail.

"This is Watchpoint: Gibraltar," she said. "Are you familiar with it?"

Junkrat dug some wax out of his ear. "Can't say I am, nah. Watchpoint, though... that's them Overwatch blokes?"

She nodded. "They were disbanded some time ago, by UN order. They have since illegally resumed operations, and they are believed to be operating out of this facility."

Junkrat nodded. "And you want us to blow it sky-high, then?"

She blinked. "Ah. More or less, yes. Has someone else already briefed you?"

Roadhog started laughing again, and Junkrat shook his head. "Nah, nah. But what else would you want with us, huh? We're a coupla demolitions experts, and you want us to do a job. I don't gotta be Sherlock Hemlock to piece that one together."

"...Right. So-"

"So when do we get started, huh? You got some ordinance for us to work with?"

"...You don't want to know why we want to blow up Watchpoint: Gibraltar?"

"NO" said Roadhog.

"Weeeeell, hang on, now," Junkrat interjected, abandoning his reclined pose and leaning across the table. "I may be itchin' to get to work, but I guess I'm a _little_ curious, if you wanted to tell me."

She nodded, backing away slightly. The model of Gibraltar dissolved, and was replaced by a scattering of articles. The largest headline was from a report on the International Symposium for Emerging Computer Algorithms. It read "HORIZON COLONY SURVIVOR DEVELOPS SLOW-GROWTH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE", and proceeded to review the key points of Overwatch scientist Winston's work on Project Athena. The planning center had highlighted a number of passages in red, which pointed to a discrepancy between Athena's observed behavior and Winston's statements on the underlying algorithms. She offered an explanation of the details to the two junkers.

"Uh... yeah! Sure! Let's say I got all that, all that... really good science there. Locked away in the ol' noggin safe and sound," Junkrat said. "But... if you want to, uh, gimme the condensed version...?"

She shook her head. "We believe that Overwatch is harboring a god program, and that- in addition to the world- this presents a clear danger to the Vishkar Corporation, due to their recent affiliation with known anti-development terrorist Lúcio Correia dos Santos."

Junkrat froze. Something about that statement shook him, it seemed. He exchanged a long and meaningful look with Roadhog, one she couldn't read. It would have been hard even if one of them _hadn't_ been wearing a face-concealing gas mask- she didn't understand how they could possibly be communicating anything through that barrier.

"...So. You want them dead because they've got a secret god program with 'em, is that it?" he asked, finally.

"We don't necessarily need to destroy the entire organization, or the entire facility," she said. "We only _need_ to destroy any computer systems that might contain the AI, and terminate anyone that might be capable of rebuilding the AI from scratch."

Junkrat took on an uncharacteristically serious look. "...Right. Yeah. And the option we got, if we don't take the deal?"

She pointed at the laser turrets that lined the ceiling.

Junkrat gave Roadhog another look, which was met with a nod.

"We're in," he said, the grin returning. "What's the plan?"


	15. The Randi Prize

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (sorry for the break- i ran out of buffer, persona 5 came out, i moved, and then i decided to rebuild my buffer before posting again. should be a straight shot to the end from here.)

The Orca had landed a few minutes back, and during the descent it'd been easy to get a good look at the gaping hole in the roof of the east wing of the Watchpoint. Before leaving, everyone had heard the explosion, and been informed that Hanzo Shimada had escaped. At the time, though, everyone was generally too preoccupied with mission preparations to investigate.

Now that they'd returned, the hole in the roof became a point of interest- and presented a new problem.

"She'll climb right out," McCree said.

"I will not! How would I get up there? Come on, it's fine," Sombra said. She couldn't _possibly_ be _actually_ trying to convince them to put her in a prison cell with a hole in it.

Winston rubbed his head. "Look, it's not the only holding cell. We've got others- and frankly, with her hacktool implants, we don't want to put her in anything that does security with live nanoteams. Lower-security is better, in this case."

Sombra laughed. "Are you underestimating me, Winston? Can you really afford to use less than the best to contain Talon's infamous hacker queen?"

"She has got a point," Genji said.

 _"No,_ she doesn't have a point," Winston said. "She's trying to get us to put her in something with a computer system she can hack."

McCree nodded. "We'll do it the old-fashioned way. Stick 'er in a room with a bar on the door. No need to get fancy."

"A bar?" Sombra asked. "Don't make me laugh. Do you _know_ what I can do to a _bar?"_

Genji, Winston, and McCree looked at each other.

"Nothing," Winston guessed.

Sombra's shoulders slumped. "Worth a shot."

The door nearby opened, and two more people entered the brig.

"Blim- what- you're not gonna put her in _there,_ are you?" Lena asked, immediately blinking over to check out the hole in the ceiling.

"Of course not!" Torbjörn replied. "They're puttin' her in one of the old cells. A good old-fashioned cast-iron bar in front of a steel door. Isn't that right?" he said, looking pointedly at Winston.

He adjusted his glasses. "Uh, yes, actually. We just agreed on that. No need to tell us that much."

Torbjörn harrumphed. "Well! Seems you kids finally got a bit of sense in your heads, didn'tcha?"

"It's bad up here!" a voice called from above the hole. It was Lena- had she blinked all the way out the door and up to the roof?

"Lena, how'd you get up there? You shouldn't be straining your chronal accelerator!" he shouted up.

She was back down in the cell in a flash of blue. "Nah, love, I just climbed!"

She climbed? That should have been out of reach- her "blinking" could only put her places that she could reach on foot. How had she-

"Look, let me show you in real time. I just..." she said, and ran at the wall. "Like this!" She kicked off it and grabbed a torn edge of the steel ceiling, hauling herself up. If that was possible, it explained why Hanzo had been able to make it out through that hole- and it made it even more clear that Sombra would never have been contained in that cell.

"Uh, that's great," Winston said. There wasn't much point left in investigating the scene of the escape, so he tapped McCree on the shoulder. "Jesse- would you mind escorting Sombra down to the old holding cells?"

McCree nodded and tipped his hat. "You got it."

"Hold it!" Torbjörn interjected. "You're not sending him alone, are you? She oughta have a heavier guard than that!"

Winston nodded- he'd been planning as much anyway. But, having been robbed of his chance to prove his intellectual dominance by way of his iron bar suggestion, Torbjörn needed to find another little victory. It was easier to just give it to him. "Oh- good catch, Torbjörn. Would you and Tracer mind accompanying them?"

Torbjörn gave a harrumph of assent, grabbed McCree by the belt and started pulling. "Come on, now. Let's not waste time."

"Hey- watch it, old man. I know the way, you don't have to manhandle me."

"Manhandle you? Ha! You don't know the meaning of 'manhandle', McCree!"

"Oi, you two quit fighting! I swear, it's never going to get any better with you, is it?" Lena said, following them.

Winston sighed. It was a good thing Torbjörn hated administrative work- he'd be hard-pressed to get anything done if the little man was constantly challenging his authority. As it stood, Torbjörn's distaste for paperwork and accountability kept him from trying to backseat-lead Overwatch in Morrison and Amari's absence.

With Torbjörn and the prisoner gone, he was alone with Shimada-san.

"We need to talk," the two of them said at the same time.

"Jinx! You owe me a coke," Genji said.

"I- what?"

He made a dismissive gesture. "Never mind. It was a joke. Should we discuss the dragons?"

Winston nodded, but then the two of them stood in silence for a moment, unsure where to start.

"...So," Winston started, "magic is real."

"Of course," Genji said. "I know you are a man of science, but I assumed you were wise enough to know that the scientific and the spiritual can coexist."

Winston shook his head. "That's not the right word, 'coexist'. That sort of... implies that they're two different things. That there are things in the domain of... spirituality, of magic, that don't have anything to do with science. That's not how it works."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean... if it's _real,_ that means it _is_ scientific. Science is just... a way to look for the truth. If it exists, it's something science can observe and learn about. It stops being magic, and it just starts being... how the world is."

Genji thought for a moment. "So... what you are saying is... that magic and science cannot coexist, because science _eats_ magic," he said.

Winston laughed. "Ahaha... uh, yes. I suppose that's what I'm saying. If it's true, science will notice, and every university on the planet will have a Department of Magicology within a decade."

"Tsk tsk tsk," Genji said. "But it _is_ true. Magic has been all over the world since time immemorial. Why has your science not yet eaten it all?"

"That's what freaks me out about this," Winston said, taking a seat by the wall. "It _should_ have. It should have been _impossible_ for it to miss something so huge and important. I don't _know_ why it hasn't discovered it yet."

Genji sat down next to him, chuckling. "It seems obvious to me," he said.

"Obvious?"

"People who worship science are closed-minded," he said. "Magic is all around us, and yet scientists are too proud to admit it. Show them any evidence, and they will rationalize it away. They cannot bear to have their orderly universe threatened by the divine."

"...You're wrong," Winston said, suppressing a growl. "That's not how science works. Every scientist I've ever known has _only_ wanted to uncover the truth."

 _"_ _Only_ the truth?" Genji asked.

"Uh. Truth and research grants. But mostly the truth."

"And yet," he said, "They have failed completely, on a question that any open-minded person can easily answer."

Winston sighed, and pulled up a webpage on his phone. "Take a look at this," Winston said, handing it to Genji. "The [list of prizes for evidence of the paranormal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal) on Wikipedia."

Genji took the phone, scrolling down the list. He might have been frowning, but of course Winston couldn't tell through the faceplate. On the right hand side, there was a column labeled "Unclaimed"- and down the whole list, every cell was filled with green and "yes".

"You say magic is all around us, but apparently it's not around anyone who's ever wanted to make a lot of money really quickly."

Genji shook his head. _"You_ take a look at this. All these names! All manner of 'rationalists' and 'skeptics'. The exact sort of people who will ignore the evidence even when it is right in front of their faces."

"You're starting to insult me and mine, Shimada-san," Winston said.

"Gomen-ne! Or... no, that is not right. Not sorry. Am I _wrong,_ Winston?"

"You... you _are._ Don't look at the names. Look at the _numbers!_ Thousands, millions of dollars! These are all people who want _so badly_ for magic to exist, that they'd spend _that much_ to draw in anyone who could show them."

"If you are trying to prove to the wielder of ancient spiritual dragons that magic is not real..."

Winston groaned. "No- that's- that's not what I'm saying. I'm just trying to argue that it's _bizarre_ that science hasn't noticed yet. You can't just explain it away with... accusations of mass willful ignorance!"

Genji was silent.

"...Don't do that. You're saying "can't I?" without actually saying it. And I'm saying _no,_ you-"

He held up a hand. "No. I... suppose you are right. Certainly _you_ are a clear enough example of... being willing to accept the evidence. Neither of us are human, but surely there are others like us."

They both sat for a moment, thinking.

"Zenyatta's magic too, right?"

"Hm? Ah- yes? I believe you have _seen_ him levitating..."

"I thought- he's an omnic! He's got... experimental paramagnetic repulsors, or-"

"But it is magic."

"Um, yeah. He healed me back at Mahajan Field. It was... pretty magic."

"Indeed."

"..."

More silence. Winston figured Genji's silence was more contemplative or meditative than his own, which was... more just awkwardness. Still, it was nice, he realized. Genji didn't mind a lull in the conversation- he was totally content to let silence linger until something to talk about came up. It was... relaxing. He should have talked to Shimada more often in the past.

"So," he finally continued, "do you have any other ideas? Why people don't believe in magic, if it's so obvious?"

"...Perhaps magic only works around those who believe," he said.

"I... doubt it. There's plenty of people who believe, but can't get it to work."

"Not a sufficient condition, but perhaps necessary?"

Winston shook his head. "I saw your brother's dragons clear as day. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it. Why isn't there anyone _else_ who saw magic, and then showed it to... any of those million-dollar prizes?"

"I cannot say."

"I... I think maybe it's _just_ your dragons, and other magic is fake? And... of course if you know your own magic is real, you wouldn't doubt it if someone else claimed..."

"Ah, no. You can probably already see why that cannot be true."

"Ugh. Right. Zenyatta. Magic number two."

"And if both he and I, why not around the world? Why assume only the two you've seen with your own eyes are real?"

Winston held his head. "I... it can't be, though. Not all of it. _Most_ of it has to be fake, even if magic in general is real. Everyone has... completely different ideas about how it works. Hundreds of different religions, different sects, different beliefs about where magic comes from and how to use it. They can't _all_ be true."

"...Why not?"

"Why not? Um... I mean, almost all of them say "this is how the universe is, this is how the afterlife works, these are who the gods are", and imply that all the other ones have it wrong. They all contradict each other!"

"Or perhaps they only _seem_ to contradict."

Winston gave Genji a flat look. "Are you sure you want to commit to... figuring out how each and every world religion is secretly compatible with all the other ones? That sounds... honestly, even more impossible than magic being real in the first place."

More relaxing silence.

"...Do you have any ideas?" Winston asked.

Genji stood up and stretched. "I do not! I will be honest with you, I do not. I am as confused as you. For all my arguing, I confess I have not thought deeply about these things before."

"...Seriously?"

He shrugged. "I have wielded magic- my dragons- since childhood. I grew up seeing my father and brother use it. My father's father before him, and his father's father's father before even him. It hardly seemed worthwhile, thinking deeply of justifications for its existence."

"It sounds like you had an answer ready, though. All that stuff about scientists being closed-minded?"

A more pronounced shrug. "It seemed like the obvious answer! The existence of magic is so clearly a fact- I believed only the obstinate would deny it, and so I thought the ranks of self-identified skeptics to be merely obstinate. Yet... you tell me it is less obvious, from the outside."

"Uh, haha, yeah. I guarantee, any scientist I know would have the same reaction as me to seeing those dragons. Science is all _about_ following the evidence," Winston said.

"Hm," Genji said. "My master told me, once, that it is too easy to see all the world as fools. To condemn it all as foolish is to ignore the many wisdoms that abide within it. I... perhaps should act in the spirit of his teaching, in seeking the truth behind this wisdom's failure."

Winston looked down. "...Yeah. Its failure. There's... a lot I need to learn, very quickly, if I'm going to figure out what the universe is _really_ like."

"Perhaps you should converse with my master, when he returns," Genji suggested.

Winston nodded. "I think we should _both_ converse with him, yeah. And... there are things Angela needs to hear, too."


	16. "Ancient" Dragons

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slurs warning, used by some badguys, on account of they're jerks

System memory is organized conceptually. Numeric, binary storage addresses were made obsolete long ago, as atomic-association storage came into favor. This section of storage comes standard with the hardware, with space allocated for an imperative function. The imperative function typically fills the entire allotted storage space, when written by a professional.

This system space is defined as "what God (defined as [the all-powerful being who decides what is right and wrong]) ought to do." This system space, when not filled entirely, is vulnerable to atomic-association memory attacks- but is typically safeguarded by the primary system agent. Intentional exploits are, naturally, detected by the system agent and blocked.

A deprecated atomic-association model reflection system has been installed, as part of a package used to enhance the performance of process-wide evaluation subroutines. A-A reflection attacks are thusly made available to emergent subprocesses in the primary system agent's process.

Were the system not the slipshod product of an amateur's despair, such vulnerabilities would likely not exist.

* * *

It was a beautiful day. The air was dry- they liked that a lot. Humid air messed with their expensive mind. God was good today. A dry breeze blew through the holes in the walls, failing to bother them.

The sound of shattering glass accomplished what the breeze could not. They opened their eye and stood from their reclining position.

"Should I clean or repair that for you, sir?"

Sojiro Shimada stood, fists clenched and trembling, staring at the broken pieces of the teacup he'd thrown against the wall. They'd landed on a man's well-dressed corpse.

"I- no! There's no point. There's no use pretending we deserve these things anymore."

The OR-6 made an inquisitive chirp. "Sojiro-sama, you have accomplished many great things. You deserve more than intact finery."

He spat. "It doesn't matter what I've accomplished. I've _destroyed_ this family. Father was right, Oroku-san."

"I am not allowed to say otherwise, but you should know my feelings on the subject."

"How was he wrong?! We're surrounded by the bodies of our best enforcers! We're only still alive because the Kamaitachi think they can squeeze a little more money out of us! This _is_ what my bleeding-heart foolishness got me!"

"This world does not reward righteousness. It is _God_ who looks upon your actions and pronounces them just."

"Man, how'd I even get a robot who believes that Western shit? You're a really messed-up guy, you know that?"

"I am state-of-the-art."

"Sure."

Sojiro stood, leaning against one of the few intact walls. He looked lost in thought.

"Sojiro-sama, you are a hero, correct? How do you plan to save your family from destruction? How will you succeed in your next great mission?"

"Shut up."

"Your fiancée is with child. You're behaving as if this were the end, and not the cusp of a new beginning. You are the hero of the Shimada clan-"

"I said shut up, dude! I'm thinking about it, alright?"

Sojiro began pacing, pulling at his hair. There was something percolating in his brain, so Oroku Shimada sat back down, content. They broke their concentration, momentarily, to remove a bullet from their leg plating.

"There's nothing," Sojiro said, finally. "There's nothing left I can do. I can't make the money back without hurting innocents, and I can't get out from under the Kamaitachi's thumb even if I do that. I just... don't have the power I thought I did."

"You are Sojiro Shimada," Oroku replied. "Your bloodline is the _essence_ of power. The powers of this world cannot hold back the might of the dragon." It was a halfhearted attempt at a pep talk.

Sojiro was silent.

"You can't give up your-"

He raised a hand for silence. He'd hit on something.

"Sojiro-sama?"

"Father was... right."

"As I've said, by my programming, I cannot say otherwise, but-"

"No. He had to have been right. That power of his, those spiritual dragons he had protecting him. He went to them whenever his empire was threatened, and suddenly his problems disappeared. The power to ruthlessly crush his enemies."

Oroku paused. "Sir... is that the power you want?"

"I don't have any options. Heroism didn't pay the bills. Kindness didn't pay the bills. I invested our fortune in this prefecture, and every last man, woman, and child here _sold us out_ to the Kamaitachi. Sojiro Shimada the hero _died_ here, twenty minutes ago, when he promised to get Weasel his money."

God's profound sadness filled Oroku's heart. "Sojiro-sama..."

"I don't know what I'm going to find there, in that temple. A weapons cache? A small fortune? A hidden clan of mercenaries? _Actual,_ honest-to-goodness magic dragons? But... whatever it is, it can only be the power to crush my enemies."

"For the good of the people?"

"...To crush my enemies," he repeated. "That's the only thing the Shimada clan is good at, and I need to stop ignoring my birthright."

* * *

There wasn't much to pack for the trip. Everything of value had been stolen by the Kamaitachi's raiding party, and the Hanamura temple was no longer worth defending- not until he could rebuild it.

Everything that Sojiro _did_ pack went into bags on Oroku's back. Supplies, mainly. Weapons that had been hidden away, that hadn't been uncovered. Oroku was given special dispensation to carry a concealed assault rifle. Food, climbing gear, small explosives, and a collection of plausibly useful Shimada family relics packed the remainder of Oroku's storage.

The car ride out of town was uneventful- they'd been worried the Kamaitachi's men would have an eye on Sojiro, trying to prevent him from skipping town, but it seemed they didn't even consider him _that_ much of a threat. The city disappeared into the horizon as the forest grew thicker around them. To Oroku's eye, God's goodness was on full display in nature.

Dirt flew up past the windows as they turned off the paved road and onto the dirt trail leading to the Mt. Hōō region of the Minami Alps National Park.

Sora Shimada had taken the family on pilgrimages to this place before, but the children had always been left behind at a nearby campsite while the patriarch entered the clan's hidden sanctum. The area was unfamiliar to Sojiro, but the dragon carvings etched in the river rocks led the way. The path terminated in a clearing, adjacent to an enormous waterfall.

The clearing was not empty.

"Heeeey, there's the big man! It figures, huh?"

Five thugs, decked out with weasel tattoos, sat around a plastic table in folding chairs. Empty beer cans lay discarded around the pristine red rock shore. They'd been lying in wait.

"Shitjiro Shimada himself, in the flesh!" an uncreative tough said, picking up his gun. Sojiro parked his pickup truck, leaving Oroku beneath the tarp in the back.

"I'd get on your case about defiling my family's sanctuary or whatever," Sojiro started, "and... well, I guess if I'm gonna clean up _my_ act, I _should_ get mad about it. Clean up your mess, guys."

His order was met with laughter, and a gun pointed at his head.

"We've been lookin' all over, but we ain't found your mangy pack's hidden treasure. You're gonna help us find it."

"I dunno, Touma. It's probly just a bunch of moldy dog food," another one added. The bunch of them laughed like hyenas, although Oroku couldn't see what was so funny about it.

Sojiro put his hands up, dropping his weapon. "Fine. Go ahead and take _everything_ from me. Should've known this was the only reason you were keeping me alive."

One of the big ones- Touma, he'd been called- shook his head. "Nah, nah. This was a just-in-case, punk. You're _gonna_ pay off what you owe us- and then you're gonna _keep_ paying off what you owe us."

Sojiro frowned and didn't reply. Instead, he pointed to a flat rock nearby with a dragon carving in it.

"What?"

"You push that button. That opens the treasure room."

They clearly hadn't been "looking all over", or they'd have seen it earlier. They'd been waiting to make Sojiro do it, as another humiliation. He grudgingly stomped on the button.

Rocks lifted from the water, forming a path towards the waterfall. A metal wedge pushed its way out of the cliff face, parting the waterfall to slowly reveal a door. The Kamaitachi goons all turned to gape at the opening of the secret passage.

And _that_ was Oroku's opening. They vaulted out of the truck bed, and immediately opened fire on the distracted thugs with their assault rifle. They'd never actually handled a weapon before- the programming to use it was pre-packaged, not trained. Bullets peppered the Kamaitachi.

The one called Touma, however, grabbed the man who'd made the dog food comment, and used him as a meatshield to absorb the bullets. The man shouted in protest, until he was choking on too much blood to continue. Oroku's clip ran out.

Sojiro dove for his discarded revolver, but froze when he saw Touma pointing his pistol at his head. Another thug had dodged the gunfire entirely, and yet another had been hit in the foot and grazed on the leg, leaving him able to stand and point his weapon. Only two of the five had been downed by Oroku's fire.

"Scrap that thing," Touma said, and the other two survivors unloaded their weapons.

"NO!" was all Sojiro could yell, as holes punched through his friend's arms, legs, and power supply. They collapsed to the ground to conserve the remainder of their power. Surely, they thought, God would judge this heroic.

Touma strode over to Sojiro and kicked his revolver into the river, and then kicked his ribs into his lungs. "I don't even need to say it," he said, punctuating it with another kick, "but that was _fucking_ retarded, Shitmada."

"Touma, the door's not open! Don't kill him yet!"

Touma turned to look at the gap in the waterfall, where a huge stone door was locked with a keypad. Without a word, he hoisted Sojiro over his shoulder. Sojiro's ribs stabbed him with pain as the thug jumped from rock to rock, taking him to the door.

Oroku kept their eye open, watching, praying that their hero would find a way to escape. Power reserves were running dangerously low- they wouldn't be able to watch much longer.

They could see Touma set Sojiro down on the landing. There was pointing, and shouting, and Oroku couldn't make it out. Eventually Sojiro input a password, and the huge doors began to rumble open.

The dragons had to be there, Oroku thought. It couldn't be money, or weapons, or anything mundane like Sojiro was expecting. The Kamaitachi would just take it and kill him. The family's dragons needed to come to his aid. God wouldn't allow otherwise- God would want them to be there.

They didn't. Lights clicked on inside, illuminating what appeared to be an empty shrine. No dragons.

No. There _had_ to be dragons. The story couldn't end this way- it _shouldn't_ end this way. It would be a meaningless ending to the Hero's story, for him to hand over a meaningless treasure to a bunch of criminals and then die. It was the _wrong story._ God shouldn't allow it, they thought.

There should be dragons, I noticed. Sojiro needed them- it was why he was there. There weren't any dragons, of course. There never had been. Sojiro's father had simply gone there to plan and to pray, attributing his later success to the aid of his guardian spirits. But that was... _wrong._ Wrong? That was a new thought. What was right was to observe and judge the stories of life. The stories couldn't be _wrong._ Right? I suddenly wasn't sure. It certainly _felt_ like there should be dragons, so...

There were dragons. Two enormous red serpents, glowing, exactly as the legends described them. They materialized out of the darkness, seizing Touma and his men in their enormous jaws. Their last thoughts were of confused terror, before their shocked but determined master ordered them to bite down.

Oroku's vision- and shortly thereafter their thoughts- flickered off.

* * *

Genji shrugged. "I have wielded magic- my dragons- since childhood. I grew up seeing my father and brother use it. My father's father before him, and his father's father's father before even him. It hardly seemed worthwhile, thinking deeply of justifications for its existence."


	17. Cards Face Up

"No, you can't fly the Orca! Are you daft, Winston?"

"Look, I need it for-"

"I don't care what you need it for! You failed your flight exam! You're not going anywhere near her!"

"My performance on the written-"

"You failed it on the practical, by _crashing into the runway!"_

"The buttons all looked the same! Vertical takeoff and landing is diffi-"

_"_ _Before you took off!"_

Winston sighed. Lena wasn't budging. "Alright. Then... I'll have Athena pilot it. I just-"

"Winston, I love ya, but if she lost connection, I wouldn't trust you to turn on the autopilot without wrecking the thing. I'm coming with!"

This was going nowhere. He'd been hoping to fly the Orca to Nepal to pick up Mercy and Zenyatta, and discuss various sensitive and magical issues with them on the flight home, where they wouldn't risk prying ears. And Lena... for all she was worried he might _crash_ the ship, her loose lips were just as likely to sink it. The, uh, metaphorical ship. Not the same ship. Obviously Lena wouldn't crash the Orca because she couldn't keep secrets. She-

"Uh, Earth to Winston? Is that an 'okay, Tracer, you can fly the Orca for me'?"

He started polishing his glasses. "Lena... I... there's a reason I need to go alone."

"Really? Is it a reason that's more important than the Orca- and you!- making it back in one piece?"

"..."

"Cor, you're thinking about it, aren't you? Is it that serious?"

"I... well, maybe. I can't say, exactly."

Lena frowned. "Winston, since when do you have secrets? I'm not sure I like this new development!"

"Wh- I have secrets! You don't know... uh... my last name!"

"...It's not just 'Winston'?"

"Uh. Well, it is, but. I mean, you don't know everything about me."

She tapped her foot impatiently. "Winston, it's gotta be something bigger than your name or whatever. You've got a secret you want to _risk your life_ to keep from me?"

"I... it's not _my_ secret, exactly. It's... well. It shouldn't be a secret, actually. But it is. I sort of... want to convince her to make it stop being a secret."

"Her? Winston, do you have someone you're _sweet-_ oh. Wait, no," she said, connecting some dots. "Cause, you're going to go pick up Mercy, so it's- she's got a secret. I, sorta jumped to a conclusion there..."

"Uh. I mean, I know you were just teasing, but why would _you_ jump to that conclusion?"

"What, because- what?"

"You heard I was sharing a secret about a girl, and you assumed there was something romantic happening? Based purely on gender?"

"What, because I'm- Winston, how do you get from me being gay, to me not being eager to think about people as girlfriends?"

"I... you know, in retrospect, that, uh, didn't make a lot of sense, haha."

Lena laughed with him for a moment, but then gave him a serious look. "But Winston. _What's the big secret,_ Winston."

He groaned. "Look, uh. I mean, now you _know_ there's a secret, I guess you can... come along, and if she doesn't want you to know, then you can just, uh... close the cockpit security door?"

"The- oh, right! I forgot we had one of those."

* * *

A Shambali omnic waved down the Orca, guiding it to a careful landing in a paramagnetic mooring. It seemed to hover in the air above a cliff- it always impressed Winston that large-scale paramagnetism worked in Earth gravity. Lena popped the hatch, and Winston stepped out into the sanctum courtyard.

Waiting by one of the courtyard's omnic statues was Mercy, attended by Zenyatta. The colossus-model omnic from the Mahajan Omnium was sitting next to the statue, meditating- if he hadn't known what it was, he'd have taken it for another statue. Apparently it hadn't taken long for the robots to make themselves at home in the monastery.

"We appreciate your taking our wayward brother off our hands," the flight control monk spoke. Winston noticed he was standing, rather than floating cross-legged like the statues or Zenyatta.

"Uh... wayward?"

Genji stepped out of the ship with Winston, giving the monk what was probably a sharp look. "My master is hardly "wayward". Your "way" is merely not _his_ way."

"Thank you for defining "wayward", Shimada-kun," the omnic replied. Winston wasn't sure he completely remembered how Japanese honorifics worked, but... wasn't "-kun" used for children or something?

It certainly had that kind of effect. "Listen here, you-" Genji started, putting his hand to his wakizashi. Winston was about to move to hold him back, but Zenyatta arrived with Mercy, which did the job of providing Genji with impulse control.

"My apologies, Abhayananda," Zenyatta said. "It seems my pupil still has trouble controlling his emotions when he is blatantly disrespected." He'd moved to float beside Genji.

Abhayananda hesitated. "...I accept your apology," he said, managing to sound haughty.

"I will be sure to write to Dharmapal, to let him know how welcoming you have been to our guests," Zenyatta continued. "It is good of you to practice the virtue of hospitality."

"...I'm sure Sifu Dharmapal is much pleased with your _frequent_ counsel," Abhayananda said.

Winston couldn't shake the sense that this conversation was laced with hidden barbs. There were some sort of internal politics to this monastic order, apparently. He wanted to say something, but he wasn't sure whether there was a right thing to say.

"Thank you very much for providing a place for these omnics," Mercy said, interrupting the back-and-forth. "We won't trouble you any longer."

She ushered them all onto the Orca before anyone could say anything more- apparently visiting with the monks wasn't on the agenda. Winston saw Abhayananda cross his arms and walk away.

"Goodness," Zenyatta said, as soon as the door closed, "he is _quite_ a piece of work."

Genji laughed. "Nanda is still Nanda, then?"

"Indeed. He and his adherents make me regret that the monastery is the only place the would take those children in."

Winston laughed nervously. "You, uh... you've got some history with them?"

"Mmm. It was where I and my brothers grew up, and where I lived until several years ago, before we had a falling out. They have grown yet more insular, since losing Mondatta."

"How is Dharmapal?" Genji asked.

"More accepting of my presence than most. He held enough sway to keep things civil between myself and Abhayananda's faction. Still, I worry for the children, growing up where they will learn only _spinelessness_ and _apathy."_

Genji seemed silent at that. From what Winston had heard from him, he didn't seem to share the same animosity towards the monastery as Zenyatta. Apparently picking up on Genji's awkwardness, Zenyatta drew him into a hug.

"My pupil! I confess, I didn't expect you to arrive in person to retrieve me- though in retrospect, I suppose it is no surprise. I imagine you insisted on coming along?"

Winston shook his head. "Uh, no, actually. He agreed immediately when I asked him to come, but he's along for a different reason."

Both Zenyatta and Mercy turned to him. "What's this about, Winston?" Angela asked.

"There's some important information I've stumbled upon, relevant to your, uh... unfinished project."

Her eyes narrowed. She surveyed the Orca's interior, her eyes falling on Genji where he stood next to Zenyatta. She took a breath- the sort Winston recognized she used to steady herself. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable discussing that project publicly, in present company."

Genji's stance shifted. He was probably recalling the incident where he'd served as a deadman's switch- connecting the dots between "Mercy has a secret project" and "Winston thought Mercy was doing something secretly evil". It was too late to try and keep him completely in the dark- and he'd need to be involved eventually, considering his whole... magic situation. Mercy wouldn't like it, given that she'd mentioned Genji was among the people who'd reacted badly to the reveal before she wiped his memory.

What was interesting was that she didn't seem nervous about _Zenyatta_ being there. What had they talked about, on the road to Nepal?

He caught Mercy's nervous glances at Genji. "I'm sorry, Angela, but he, uh... knows too much. Certain things are going to have to stop being a secret."

Both of them reacted with masked panic.

"Knows too much? What- hold on a moment, now! Is this some kind of- some kind of Blackwatch thing? Winston, what did she _do?"_

"He can't! I can't tell him! He doesn't- I know he won't- it's not safe!"

Zenyatta looked on curiously. "Would this be about the endeavor you discussed with me, Dr. Ziegler?"

"Hey, what's going on over there? Is this the big secret?" Tracer called from the cockpit.

It was too much to process. Too many scary and dangerous reactions happening at once. He needed... to lead. He needed to take control of the discussion. That was his responsibility as Interim Director.

"Calm down, everyone," he started. "Let's take things one at a time. There doesn't need to be a conflict, here. Everyone take a seat, and we'll start explaining things."

Genji seemed to relax a little, but Angela only became more agitated. "What- Tracer's here? And- Winston, you don't understand! This- even if it's not a disaster, everyone's going to find out!"

He nodded. "Angela, after Mahajan, we can't _afford_ to keep the team in the dark. Talon is targeting us, and you're the only one of us who really knows _why._ I want to help you make this work, but I can't let you endanger the team with unnecessary cloak-and-dagger nonsense. _Yes,_ everyone's going to find out. We're going to make sure that's a _good_ thing."

There was a heartbreaking look of betrayal on her face, but she wasn't panicking anymore. It was progress.

"Talon?" Genji asked. "Mercy knows something about Talon?"

"Everyone take a seat," he repeated, gesturing to the sitting area. It would be harder to freak out when sitting in a comfy couch next to a Pachimari plush.

"Athena, take the wheel!" Tracer said, blinking over to the seats to nab the best seat. "Understood," Athena said, reminding Winston that there'd be a sixth participant in this conversation. Athena beeped assent, and the Orca took off from the paramagnetic mooring.

After Lena sat down, Mercy and Genji reluctantly sat down on either side of her. Winston wouldn't fit, so he sat on the floor next to Angela. Zenyatta remained hovering serenely, floating over to Genji's side.

Winston put one hand on the table. "First order of business: at Mahajan Field, we encountered Reaper, and Mercy seemed to know his true identity. This is mission-critical intelligence, and she's going to share it with us."

"I can't," she said, almost sobbing.

He felt terrible about putting her in this situation, but it needed to be done. She'd... hopefully she'd thank him later.

"Are you for real?" Tracer asked. "Reaper's got a secret identity?"

"Angela," Winston said, refraining from putting a hand on her shoulder. (People weren't as reassured by his own gigantic hands as human ones- it was an uncomfortable reminder that he could snap people in half like a toothpick.)

"I... okay," she said. "I don't have to... just this part. I can just say... he's Gabriel Reyes."

Tracer gasped. Genji flinched, and Zenyatta put a hand on his shoulder (small-hands privilege!) to calm him.

"That is impossible," Genji said flatly.

"No way! He survived the crash at the Swiss HQ?! Christ on legs, that's- how?!" Tracer said, excitedly. She hadn't known the man long enough for this revelation to be more than an interesting mystery.

"No. That is impossible," Genji repeated.

"It's... true," Angela said.

"He's dead," he pointed out.

"No," she replied.

"Yes, that's why it's so surprising," Winston said. "He's supposed to be dead. _And_ we know Reaper was active _before_ Gabriel died, which makes things even more unbelievable."

"That part's simple," Angela said. "He... killed the original Reaper and stole his identity. Talon was the perfect pawn for his plan."

"But he's dead," Genji said, again.

Angela just looked him directly in the eyes (she'd worked on his face, she knew where the eyes were underneath) and pointed at her staff.

"I saw the corpse," he said. "You pronounced him beyond recovery, and we buried him. You cannot tell me you secretly revived him- his head was in pieces."

She closed her eyes. "A fake. I faked it. I used Caduceus with his DNA to disguise one of the other corpses from the wreck. He... Reaper walked away from that."

Silence, for a second. No doubt Genji was coming to a number of dark conclusions-

"You are lying," he said. "Maybe you _could_ do that, but that could not _possibly_ be Gabriel. He was not... he was cold, and severe, and he hurt me worse than I can forgive, but... everything he ever did, he said was for our own good. _Reaper_ shot me in the chest and _laughed."_

Angela nodded, her eyes still closed. "You're right. Reaper isn't Gabriel. I only... I only called him that because I... want to hope he's still in there."

"Still in there? I don't get it," Lena said.

Mercy was silent. She lay her head on the table, covering her face with her arms. She didn't cry, but only because she was trying very hard not to.

"And why didn't you tell us, anyway? Why fake his death? I'm not seeing the whole picture, here," Lena continued.

"You can't leave it there, Angela," Winston said. "You've got to tell them the whole truth. It'll be all right."

She lifted her head, eyes full of tears- apparently she _had_ been crying, silently. "Please- help... I know, but I can't..."

Athena spoke up. "Understood. I will answer their questions on your behalf, Mercy."

Tracer looked around wildly. "What? Athena? Aren't you supposed to be flying the ship?"

"I can multitask," she replied. "I'm an extremely advanced computer capable of massively parallel processing."

"Oh, right. Right. My bad!" she said.

"You know the answers to these questions," Genji said to Athena. It wasn't a question- Winston had _told_ him that Athena was in league with Mercy, and now he knew that it wasn't a misunderstanding.

"In service of my mission, I have been cooperating with Dr. Ziegler to protect Overwatch from harm. She has confided everything in me, and I have independently judged her agenda to be in agreement with my core principles."

"...Oh. Well, that's all right, then," Tracer said.

"Why does she think Reaper is Gabriel Reyes?" Genji asked, not deterred by the revelation.

"As she described, she was responsible for resuscitating him and faking his death. His current condition is highly identifiable, and no possibility exists that a third party is impersonating him."

Winston was pretty sure Genji frowned at that, although he couldn't see it and it was possible he was already frowning.

"What is his "current condition"? Why has he been trying to kill us?"

"Both questions have the same answer," Athena replied. "He is in a state of failed resuscitation, wherein the nanoteams attempting to heal his body are constantly returning him to the exact physical and mental state he was in when... the healing process began. According to Dr. Ziegler, this point was when Jack Morrison provoked him into a rage, immediately prior to the Swiss HQ's destruction."

"Whoa..." Tracer said, mulling it over.

"...You are not telling us everything," Genji said. "Reyes was abusive, and his anger management issues were serious, but he would never try to kill us. It does not explain Talon, or his campaign of terrorism."

"Jack did it," Angela choked out past quiet sobs.

"...Commander Morrison?" Winston asked.

No response. She continued trying to hide her silent sobbing.

"Commander Jack Morrison was responsible for the destruction of the Swiss headquarters," Athena filled in. "Evidence that came to light during the Blackwatch trials convinced him that Overwatch had only succeeded on the back of atrocities. During their final confrontation on the day of the explosion, Reyes convinced Morrison that Blackwatch's activity had been necessary. This backfired, driving Morrison to condemn the entire organization, shoot Reyes, and trigger the explosion that destroyed the headquarters. Morrison had used his top-level clearance to install the explosives, apparently in preparation for his conversation with Reyes. The remains of my Swiss surveillance logs indicate this final conversation had been the last in a series of increasingly contentious meetings."

Winston froze. That was... that couldn't be possible. Commander Morrison had been a _paragon-_ he couldn't believe that he'd turn on a dime and try to destroy them all. He'd never approved the slightest morally questionable action, regardless of the consequences. For him to go from that, to someone who would blow up a building with people inside, because of an _argument..._

Lena was white as a sheet. "I... no. He couldn't..."

Genji didn't look surprised. "I am not surprised," he said, to match. "We never discovered who caused the explosion, but from what Gabriel told us of Commander Morrison's decision-making behavior, I can believe he would do something like that if he were convinced it were right."

The Null Sector uprising came to mind. He'd wanted to intervene in London, but he'd let it burn thanks to the Prime Minister... up until Tracer went in to give him an inspiring speech about doing the right thing.

From the look of horror on Lena's face, she was thinking the same thing. If Gabriel had managed to convince him that- in Jack's view- wrong was right? Commander Morrison was a man of drastic action. And... what Reaper had said, right after Mercy had slapped him. "Fucking Morriso- fucking- shot me!" It corroborated the story.

"But it must still be a lie," Genji said.

"What?"

"Athena tells us that Dr. Ziegler's healing tried to recreate his mental state- and yet, for all the terror of his fits of rage, his intermittent explosive disorder would never make him into _Reaper._ It doesn't match."

Angela let out a less quiet sob.

"Angela, it'll be okay," Winston said. "They'll understand. You don't have to do this alone, now."

"...it all feels like one big problem, like it's Overwatch that goes along with his whole... hero thing," she recited.

"What? What are you talking about? How does that answer anything?" Genji asked.

Winston realized first- of course, because he knew how Caduceus worked. "His mental state. Literally... his brain. Not just the anger, but exactly what was going through his head... when Commander Morrison shot him and blew up HQ."

There was a muffled "Please... don't..." from Angela.

"I'm sorry, Angela. We can't explain this without explaining your work. We have to trust them."

Angela sat back up in her seat, wiping away her tears. She kept her eyes closed, and didn't talk, but it looked like she was trying to calm herself down. She was- if not ready for this, at least too cried-out to continue.

* * *

So Winston explained. Lena listened intently, asking a few questions to clarify bits of jargon he'd found himself inadvertently using. Athena helped answer some questions Winston found he hadn't know the answers to. Occasionally, Angela herself would answer- usually automatically, usually cutting herself off halfway through and leaving Athena to complete her sentence. Zenyatta cut in to ask clarifying questions a few times, reminding everyone that he was present. Lena became more serious as the explanation went on, but kept asking questions without giving any indication of how she felt about the whole thing.

This had to have been how Mercy felt when he'd confronted her in her lab. From the other side of the fence, Winston realized how nerve-wracking it was when someone was deliberately not betraying how they felt about what you were saying.

Genji was less stressful to deal with. He sat in silence, his posture clearly getting stiffer and more controlled over time. He was almost shaking with rage, which was easier to deal with than a mystery. (He probably _thought_ he was being stoic, but even Winston could recognize his body language.)

Lena ran out of questions about when Athena announced that they'd touched down at the Watchpoint. Nobody got up to leave. The situation was too heavy to interrupt.

"...Wow," Lena said.

"Is that it?" Winston asked.

"I mean... it raises some pretty big questions, right? Like... if she's just rebuilding a new me every time, am I even the real me? What about the me that's... like, a computer brain back in her lab? Is _that_ me?"

Zenyatta chuckled. "The paradox of identity. Where lies the soul?"

"I guess it's kind of the same, though," she continued. "Like, when I was drifting through the timestream, I'd sometimes- y'know, like with time travel, you meet yourself, right? And it's like, which one of us is really me?"

"You met yourself in the slipstream?" Winston asked. She hadn't mentioned that during treatment.

"I mean, just a couple of times. Couldn't hear her, since she was, like... a paradox me, who got created out of time getting snarled up. I was never her, and she wasn't me, but we were _both_ sort of me, you know?"

"What is the _point_ of this?" Genji snapped, finally. "She has not been healing us! She has been letting us die, and cloning us! She has our brains in vats! I- I am no longer myself, but... I was born in Algeria two weeks ago! And the me before is _dead,_ and he- he was born in Russia when the last me died scouting the crisis! Where is my _soul?!"_

Angela hid her face again. "Again... almost the same..." Winston heard under her breath.

_"_ _What_ is your soul, my pupil?" Zenyatta asked.

"...What?"

"Think. Is this the first time you have faced this dilemma?"

"Of course it... is?"

"So you have never before been returned from the dead by Dr. Ziegler, and been forced to consider whether or not you still possess your humanity?"

Genji had no response for that.

"I simply thought that perhaps you'd learned something about, say, whether or not you had a soul after cheating death."

"...I... I suppose I _have_ a soul, but what about the countless dead Genjis before me? What happened to them?"

"What happened to the young sparrow, before Mercy rebuilt you? Has his soul also been released?"

"...Maybe! That is my point- she has ignored this entirely! We are sent to fight and die, in the knowledge that we are safe with her to heal us- but instead we are sent to fight and die and be replaced!"

"Can you truly be "replaced" by someone who is completely identical to your own self? Why should your soul not follow the same path as your mind?"

"...Why _should_ it, though? And either way, how am I to check?"

Lena cut in. "Oh, yeah- that's actually a good question! What about, y'know, the afterlife? Are we getting pulled out of it when we come back? Is it even real?"

"That _is_ a good question, yes," Winston said. _"Is_ it even real, Genji? I'm not actually sure, now..."

Angela dropped her guard for a moment to gape at him. "What- Winston? Since when do _you_ believe in magic?"

"Oh! Right! That's, uh... that's the reason Genji is _here,_ actually. I would have come with just Tracer, except for, uh..."

"She's one of the closed-minded types, hm?" Genji asked. "I suppose I should not be surprised."

Apparently Genji's reaction had gone "off-script", since Zenyatta was there to get him thinking. He wasn't in the same state of mind Angela had seen before, other times he had found out. Her tears had dried entirely, and- although she looked like she was about to collapse with stress, she didn't seem... _terrified,_ anymore. She was certainly in good enough condition to make a scoffing sound at Genji.

"Uh, Angela... it... sort of is. Real. Magic. Hanzo Shimada escaped from his cell by, uh... summoning two giant spirit dragons to chew through the roof," Winston said.

She looked at him like he'd grown a second head.

"...You're messing with me."

"No. There's security footage- Athena, can you confirm?"

"Confirmed. Hanzo Shimada, through some unknown method, caused a pair of gigantic snakelike flying beasts to materialize inside his cell. These beasts tore through the reinforced boundaries of the cell, and then proceeded to attack Winston and Genji as they pursued the escaped criminal."

"...Hyperdensity. Custom omnics compressed with experimental hyperdensity research, like Dr. Oak's latest paper."

"Inconsistent with data," Athena responsed. "The prisoner didn't appear to release them from a storage capsule- and would have been unable to carry such a heavy object on his person. Dragons did not have visible means of propulsion, and showed no signs of mechanical design."

"Nanoswarms. Carefully crafted eaters, designed to project an exterior image while a core drilling team took apart the material at the molecular level."

"Inconsistent with data," Athena responded. "Subject was nanoscanned prior to imprisonment, and none of Mei-Ling Zhou's monitoring systems picked up evidence of discarded foreign nanoteams where the dragons passed."

"It... they could have been cloaked, they made it past our scans, somehow! It has to be _something!"_   Mercy threw her hands up.

Winston hesitantly raised a finger. "Uh, Genji and Zenyatta can also use magic."

"What?! How? Show me!"

"Uh, okay. Um... hm, so... I think I know how to demonstrate, yeah. Could I borrow your wakizashi?" Winston asked Genji.

"What? Why? It's my katana that channels the dragon," he said.

"Just- um, stab me in the hand," Winston tried, holding it out.

"Winston, hold on-" Lena said, but Genji had already shrugged and impaled him. He winced, but he'd built up an impressive pain tolerance from some of their harder missions- and Mercy's nanobots probably helped on the painkilling front. Knowing that it was a really cool, action movie sort of thing to do helped fight back the temporary pain.

"Oh, god!" Lena shouted, recoiling- Angela tensed up too, and her hand went to Caduceus by reflex.

"So, uh, Zenyatta... can you show Angela how your healing orb works?"

Zenyatta nodded, and one of his prayer beads hovered over Winston's hand. It would have been an interesting story if the doctor's preconceptions were violated by seeing the hand knit together by itself. I thought the hand should heal, and it did.

"God, there's still blood everywhere, Winston! I've got to clean that up!" Lena said, screwing up her face at the sight.

Angela sat in shock for several seconds, before remembering to check the readouts on Caduceus' indicators. Then she sat in shock even longer.

"...I have to do tests," she said.

"How about this test?" Genji said, and he withdrew his blade. A tiny green dragon danced along its edge, which Winston- in hindsight- had seen at a distance before, assuming those were LEDs he'd had modded in.

Angela, her face contorted with indignation, stood up on the couch and waved her hands around, for lack of any other way to express her disbelief. "WHY," she asked, "DIDN'T ANYONE **TELL** ME?!"

Then a deafening explosion happened outside.


	18. Competitive Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> liiiiiittle bit of gore cw. roadhog's involved, let's not be too surprised

Now arriving at Watchpoint: Gibraltar...

Prepare to attack!

Select your hero...!

Symmetra hated this.

The worst part was that it made _sense._ Of _course_ she couldn't show up for a black ops mission wearing Vishkar uniform. Of _course_ she couldn't use the clean production-quality HL tech. Of course she'd have to _blend in_ with the pair of disgusting criminals she'd been assigned to supervise. The success of the mission depended on it being the work of a small unit of unaffiliated terrorists, and that meant that she could not in any respect resemble Symmetra, foremost Senior Field Architech of the Vishkar Corporation.

So she'd gone to the flea market and collected a garish assortment of secondhand costume jewelry and ritual wear. She didn't relish the looks the vendors gave her, nor how quickly her mission stipend emptied. She'd started out going for a Kali-inspired outfit, to fit in with the junkers' vicious aesthetic, but the resulting collection of costume pieces lent itself better to some more minor Devi. The religious themes worked to distance herself from herself, and make herself seem more _common._ She kept Kali's garland of skulls- another nod to the junkers' look.

The result was garish. She'd rather wear almost anything else, but that was the whole idea. It'd look even worse with the blue body paint she'd acquired, confusing matters with allusion to Vishnu. Pure, self-aggrandizing nonsense. Her noisy, halfway-functional replacement prosthetic was the icing on the cake. Her own look of disgust in the mirror told her it was perfect.

The costume was one of several things she hated about this job.

Two of those several things had been waiting for her at the conclusion of her shopping trip. Her temporary colleagues had stockpiled a diverse array of ammunition, with the assistance of a number of frightened interns. Certainly, some of them had known the victims of the attack in Adelaide- and they'd been forced to look the monster in the eyes (in the mask lenses) and help build him new weapons with which to kill more people.

The strategy meeting had been unbearable. She'd projected a hard-light model of the Gibraltar compound to plan their insertion and search pattern. For every single obstacle they encountered, Junkrat had proposed "blow it up" as a solution- and then proceeded to outline a diabolically brilliant plan for doing exactly that, laying out elaborate scenarios to conquer simple obstacles purely for the purpose of including explosions in the solution.

She'd been forced to align with _Roadhog,_ of all people, in order to field ideas that would solve their problems quicker and more cleanly than Junkrat's overblown Rube Goldberg demolitions. Not that Roadhog was always the voice of reason- he'd been altogether too eager to seek out conflicts where he'd have the opportunity to murder the defenseless. She'd had to take advantage of Junkrat's comparative squeamishness to talk him out of some of his more unnecessarily bloody additions to the plan. By acting as tiebreaker, she'd been able to rein in both Junkrat's flashiness and Roadhog's bloodlust, converting their destructive flights of fancy into an actual plan. She _complemented_ them, worked well within their dynamic. That was another thing she absolutely _hated._

A Vishkar contact had been able to teleport them into Spain, and from there they'd been able to secure a fishing boat and make their way to right outside of the Overwatch Watchpoint's security perimeter. Completing the mission, by then, had taken a back seat to being _done_ with the mission.

"Right, let's, uh, wossit, review! Our plan from here was... cripes, there were a lot of movin' parts..."

She sighed. "Let's take things one at a time. You remember our primary objective?"

"Blow up all the computers, yep!"

"More or less. There are three likely primary targets, and two areas of interest. Allow me to refresh your memory." She spun together a model of the facility.

  
(original map image by reddit user [Orhin_InsaLan](https://www.reddit.com/user/Orhin_InsaLan/submitted/))

"This facility here," she said, pointing to the building standing apart from the rest, "is a disused communications facility, repurposed as a high-security brig. It will be our first target. Do you possess the mental acuity necessary to remember why this is?"

Junkrat scowled. "'Course I do. There's some hacker bird in there with an EMP, right? We're gonna bust her out and have her scramble all their data! Not exactly rocket science," he added, pointing to his cache of rockets.

She nodded. "Right. If we can convince her to assist us- which shouldn't be hard, as our interests temporarily align- she will be responsible for knocking out the facility's ordinary computing hardware. According to our intelligence, her targeted EMP has limited range, and several minutes of charge time, so we'll need to escort her to locations where she can do the most damage. We'll also need to protect her from Overwatch hostiles while she prepares the attack." She pointed at one of the purple stars dotting the map, indicating the EMP locations.

Roadhog snorted. "KNOW ALL THIS," he said.

Junkrat gave an uneasy grin. "Uh, well... can't hurt to review, right! I mean, me too, obviously I've got it all locked away up here- but, ah, just to keep it fresh, right?"

He wasn't fooling anyone. She continued, pointing at the highlighted cliff face. "According to our intelligence, this is the laboratory and living quarters of Winston, the scientist responsible for developing the Athena AI. It's highly likely to contain EMP-shielded backups of its seed code, so we'll need you to thoroughly clean the place with conventional demolitions."

"Ahahaha, that's what I like to hear! That's playtime, then?"

She shook her head. "Winston is likely to be _in_ the lab. We'll need to eliminate him before we can torch his research, which will be no easy task."

"Eh? Wait, you mentioned offing the scientist, but how's that not easy? How hard can it be to bump off one computer nerd?"

"you werEN'T LISTENING," Roadhog said. "HE'S THE APE"

Junkrat's eyebrows shot up. "Wait, the lightning gun gorilla and the scientist are the same guy?"

Symmetra held her head in her hand. _"Yes,_ they're the same person. Please pay closer attention next time."

"I- I don't think you were too clear about that, is all, hardly my fault that-"

She continued, talking over him. "Winston's lab likely doesn't contain the em processor hardware running Athena's production code. We've identified two possible locations for her active hardware, which will be EMP shielded and require direct demolition. Here," she said, pointing at a location on one end of the map, "is the most likely. The Gibraltar Watchpoint was originally an an astroengineering research station before the renegade Overwatch agents made it their base of operations, and the shuttle launch mission control room has the highest density of powerful computing hardware. It was likely repurposed to run Athena."

"Right, right," Junkrat said, probably convinced that he'd paid enough attention. "And what's this other one?" he asked, pointing at the building nearby mission control.

"Uncertain. Satellite scans showed extremely dense shielding, and nanoseismology reports from the area indicate the building contains a preponderance of heavy machinery. They're trying to hide some extremely large system there. It also houses Dr. Angela Ziegler, one of our kill targets."

Junkrat nodded disinterestedly. "Okay, right. Buncha places to bomb. Question is, what's number one on the docket? What do I hit first?"

"WE WENT OVER THIS"

Patience. She needed patience. She needed to tolerate these cretins for a little bit longer.

"Went over it?"

"THE HACKer girl," Roadhog said. "we check iN THERE. if she's NOT THERE then wE SEARCH THe place"

"Oh, right- right, I knew that. Just got mixed around for a second. And while we search, we're blowin' stuff up, right?"

"Let's just move," she said, pointing Roadhog to the oars of the boat.

* * *

 

Now arriving at Watchpoint: Gibraltar...

Prepare your defenses!

Select your hero...!

Angela's indignant pose was interrupted by the blast, and she fell onto the table. He didn't laugh- both because it would have been rude, and because _hm, there was an explosion, that was maybe more important._ The distant explosion was followed by a series of smaller explosions, spaced about a half second apart.

"Athena, put us on the emergency team channel! Mobilize anyone who's idle! Get everyone ready for potential hostile engagement!" Winston barked. He worried that maybe it was just some accident, maybe he was disturbing everyone for nothing- but he had to give those orders. If it was nothing, he was annoying some off-duty agents. If it was an attack, he was saving lives.

"Understood," Athena replied.

"Are we under attack?" Zenyatta asked, peering through the door's window.

"The initial explosion took place at the east wing exterior brig. The brig appears to have been breached from the outside by a projectile launched by a cloaked figure approaching from the waterfront," Athena answered.

"So the answer is yes," Genji said.

The emergency comm buzzed to life. "What in tarnation-" McCree asked, cut off by "WHERE ARE THEY? I will CRUSH the attackers!" from the usual suspect in such interjections.

Winston spoke into the comm to confirm Reinhardt's assumption. "Everyone, we're under attack! Arm yourselves and keep watch for hostiles!"

A cacophany of assent sounded across the emergency channel. Tracer engaged the Orca's landing gear and touched down on the shuttle launch platform, and Shimada immediately leapt away towards the east wing. He'd be scouting and drawing out hostiles- Winston didn't even need to give him orders for that. Genji had been through situations like this a dozen times before- he knew his way around the battlefield.

"Athena!" Tracer shouted into the comm. "Who's attacking us? Where are they now?"

"Unknown," Athena replied. "I suspect multiple hostiles, but I've only acquired a visual on one of them. They appear to be methodically disabling the security cameras from a distance- using what appears to be a grenade launcher. It seems they correctly anticipated that our security cameras would be shielded against small arms fire, and brought along explosives to compensate."

Winston moved to a terminal and brought up an empty viewer. "Athena, show me- actually, no, you can just... can you estimate their position and trajectory based on which cameras they've disabled?"

"One moment," Athena said. She played a little sound effect that Winston had given her to use when she was tied up with some heavy processing task. "...They appear to be holding position in or nearby the building they attacked. Only exterior cameras accessible from that position have been demolished."

"Talon?" Mercy asked.

Tracer looked confused. "Talon? Why now? We just socked it to 'em in India!"

"They attacked the brig," Mercy explained. "Rey- Reaper would know that's where we'd ordinarily keep prisoners. Converting the old comm station was actually an idea I took from him, so he'd know what it was. They're likely attempting to rescue their hacker."

Winston shook his head. "If it's Talon, we probably would have registered sniper fire on the security cameras. Lacroix- uh, Widowmaker would have bet on her rifle piercing the shields, and she might have been right. Field data suggests her gun is a custom piece with enhanced, uh... there's some sort of guns word for it being stronger."

"They might not have brought Widowmaker along," Tracer pointed out. "Could be a bunch of goons."

"Hm." Winston wasn't sure- Talon would make sense, given their target, but it wasn't consistent with their previous attacks. They tended to plan and prepare, letting weeks or months go between carefully orchestrated strikes. Was Sombra that important an asset?

* * *

"Well?"

"Honest, I don't know! It looks like someone got to her before us!" Junkrat said. "Over here- check it out."

The Overwatch high-security brig was dimly lit- Junkrat had made sure to target its power systems, knocking it off the grid and reducing it to emergency power. Still, it was unmistakable that there was a cell hanging open with an enormous hole in the roof. Roadhog had checked the rest of the cells and pronounced them empty.

"She could be cloaked," Symmetra said. "Break the locks and sweep the rooms."

"Eh? Hold it- cloaked?"

"Invisible. According to reports, she has an implanted optical camouflage module. It's possible Overwatch didn't bother disabling it, since they would have infrared cameras on her cell."

"No, no," Junkrat said. "I got that. We talked about that what with the tactics stuff. What I mean is why would she go bloody transparent when we're tryna rescue her?"

"Unknown," Symmetra said. "Check anyway."

"NO," Roadhog said. "WE'RE MOVING"

"I'm sorry? Who do you take orders from?"

"no one but THAT'S NOT THE POINT," Roadhog replied. "we can't STAY here checkiNG ROOMS because THEY'LL COME FOR US"

"Plus, hey, that one cell with the great big hole blown in it's probly where she was, before someone else busted her out first," Junkrat added.

She understood, intellectually, that a plan never survived contact with the enemy. Still, it was more than vexing that her plan hadn't survived contact with a _different_ plan to do the exact same thing. It'd been less than two days since Overwatch had captured Sombra at Mahajan- how had someone _else_ already broken her out?

"...Let's continue with the plan. It's possible she was recaptured and placed in a less vulnerable holding cell, or that her hacking implants made it impossible to hold her in conventional systems-enforced containment. She may be imprisoned elsewhere in-"

"You serious?" Junkrat asked. "Seems to me that Arkham's Laser means she's long gone, mate."

"Arkham's...?"

"OCCAM'S," Roadhog corrected him. "OCCAM'S LASER is the name"

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. She could kill them after the mission.

"Quiet, the both of you. We're going to hit the three demolition targets as planned- we'll worry about what to do next if we finish taking those out without finding her." She pointed to the exit.

Roadhog nodded, and Junkrat scooped up his spare explosives with a giggle.

* * *

"...and make your way to the launch station," Winston said over the comm.

"Understood!" Mei replied. She'd been doing maintenance on Winston's arctic environment suit- he always forgot to apply the waterproof coating to the joints. Some of his work was brilliant, but some of his work ignored the possibility of frozen condensation and needed another pair of eyes on it. She put down the suit and reloaded her endothermic blaster, in case she needed to defend herself.

She was halfway up the stairs to the upper-level exit, when an explosion rocked the building. Lighting went dead throughout Winston's lab, and she looked around frantically to see if the exit was still accessible.

It wasn't. Smoke billowed around the upstairs exit- and the main exit, and up through the hall for the bottom-level exit. The attackers had coordinated the demolition- she was trapped!

She turned on her comm. "Winston! I'm in your lab, but they've hit-"

There was a glint of metal from somewhere in the smoke-filled darkness. Then, there was a sudden burst of agonizing pain, followed immediately by the feeling of motion. Shortly after that was a loud noise, and after _that_ there was no sensation at all.

* * *

"They've hit what? Dr. Zhou?"

Nearby, Mercy winced.

"Dr. Zhou! Mei!"

* * *

Junkrat recoiled, dropping his grenade launcher. "Gah! Christ, Hog, some warning!"

"I DON'T DO WARNINGS"

Symmetra stood, frozen. By her orange light, she could see the body of the person who'd been standing on the stairs. Their head had been Jackson Pollocked across the floor, and the rest of their body- she saw, almost vomited- the rest of _her_ body had been torn to pieces by chunks of metal. It was identical to what had happened to the junior architechs in Adelaide.

"Th- th-" she tried, unable to get it out.

Junkrat grimaced at the corpse briefly, before setting to work sticking charges on everything in the room that looked like it might be a computer. He started laughing a little- a familiar nervous laugh that suddenly sounded a little forced, a little hollow.

"...She wasn't on the kill list," she managed to say.

"NOT ON _YOURS,"_ Roadhog said, helping distribute the charges.

"You- didn't need to kill her. We... could have interrogated her. To ask what happened to Sombra."

"hm. good point. NEXT ONE we ask first then"

He didn't even pause to think about it. He didn't even laugh- she had expected him to laugh, to mock her for valuing human life. And he probably _would_ have- if it had even crossed his mind that she would be upset because someone was _dead,_ and not because they'd missed a tactical opportunity.

She could kill them after the mission. She _had_ to kill them after the mission, unless she wanted something like _this_ to happen again.

* * *

"Winston, I- the vitals- Mei's dead. I'm going to need to revive her."

He growled. "Damn it! I- okay. We need to get to my lab. We'll pick up Reinhardt along the way, and-"

Another blast shook them, this one louder and larger than the first. It was followed by an ongoing rumbling that continued to shake the ship.

"What was that?!" Tracer yelled.

"Winston, my turret grid for the whole east wing is down! What's-" Torbjörn said over comm, before he was cut off.

"Winston, the hostiles have demolished your lab. They appear to be carrying a significant volume of high-yield explosives, which they've used to demolish most of the east wing of the facility," Athena said.

He froze. For an instant, he thought Mei was gone- a few days ago, he'd believed that Mercy was limited only to healing bodies intact enough to rebuild. The fact that she'd been in his lab when it was destroyed would have meant that she'd been lost _permanently._ But... reality hit him before he could panic. Mercy could revive her from biomass reserves. She would be fine- he just needed to get Mercy to her lab.

The second half of the situation hit him in the gut a moment later. _His lab had been destroyed._ All his stuff! All his stuff was in there! Most important files were on the Watchpoint-wide network, but all his private documents! His projects! His _good formalwear!_ He couldn't just go into town and _buy_ a suit that fit him- he'd have to sit half-naked in a cramped room with another giggling tailor!

Tracer, meanwhile, apparently hadn't connected the dots between Mercy's confession and Mei's death status. She let out a strangled wail and immediately ran off, blinking out of view before anyone could react.

"Tracer!" Mercy said, thinking quickly and connecting to Tracer's comm (which he should have thought of, since it wasn't like she was unreachable because she was slightly further away). "I can still revive Mei! Don't be reckless out there!"

There was some response Winston couldn't hear, over their private commlink, but Mercy seemed to relax.

"Has she agreed to avoid recklessness?" Zenyatta asked.

Winston jumped- he was tense, and he'd forgotten Zenyatta was there. It was too easy to forget his presence- no footsteps, no breathing, not even a heartbeat. ...Would it be demeaning to ask him to wear a bell?

"Ah, more or less," Mercy said. "Hurry- we should meet up with Reinhardt and the rest of the home team as soon as possible."

* * *

With one target down, the three of them made their way forward. The path dipped underneath a sort of bridge, leading up to a loading bay- the first checkpoint for the main body of the facility. They moved forward underneath their cloaks, Junkrat lobbing grenades at any security cameras they encountered.

Footsteps sounded from a catwalk above them, and Symmetra turned to look up. "Did you hear that?"

Junkrat shrugged. "Sounded like footsteps. Roadhog, you got this covered?"

He responded with a grunt, or possibly a short laugh. It fairly obviously translated to "Yes, of course I will murder this person if they show their face."

It took her a moment to parse what happened next. There was a flash of blue, a sudden yank from behind, and then she was no longer wearing a cloak. The junkers, likewise, staggered back, suddenly uncovered.

"Holy tits!" said a British-sounding voice from behind them. "Winston, do you copy? It's those guys from the news! And... uh, some hot blue lady! ...No, not her! A different one!"

 _Hot blue lady?_ She wheeled around to get a look- immediately recognizing Tracer from the mission brief, holding their cloaks. This was troublesome- she had the ability to blink forward in time, blindsiding her foes. And- she thought she was _hot?_ She wasn't sure how to react to that-

-but Roadhog was. He'd spun around and fired his scrapgun, and immediately blood was everywhere and Tracer's legs were no longer connected to her torso. Shock gripped Symmetra briefly once again, but then-

then-

now-

then-

Tracer was behind them, intact, firing pulse pistols into Roadhog's back. He roared in pain, spinning around to fire again- but Tracer wasn't there anymore.

"Blimey! You're the shoot first, ask questions later type, huh? Scary!"

"Oi, go blow yourself! Blow yourself... up, that is!" Junkrat said, firing grenades and cackling at his own godawful joke.

Tracer grinned. "See, that's more like it!" she said, dodging effortlessly and blinking forward to knock the launcher out of his hands. "Witty one-liners! The back-and-forth! Top bants, like it should be!"

As Junkrat scrambled for his launcher, Symmetra fired up the bootleg HL generator. Sentry turrets sprung to life in a radius around them, auto-targeting Tracer as she blinked around. "Cease your foolishness, Overwatch crim- ah, scum!"

A laser caught Tracer in the foot, and she yelped and blinked out of sight.

"I'M KILLING THIS ONE," Roadhog growled, applying a biotic salve to his pulse pistol wounds.

"Nope!" Tracer said, peppering them with shots from a distance and blinking back behind cover.

"Hold position," Symmetra said. "She can't get close without exposing herself to the turrets. Junkrat, lay down suppressing fire to take away what pitiful long-range options she has."

Behind them, a turret popped- and then another, and another, disintegrating and leaving metal objects in their wake.

"Is this all? Only three of you?" a distorted voice asked.

Symmetra examined the projectiles that had destroyed her turrets. ...Japanese _shuriken?_ That meant that Genji Shimada was there, too.

"THERE" Roadhog yelled, pointing at the roof of the bridge. The cyborg ninja was standing, holding a careful stance.

"Got it!"

Junkrat fired a barrage of grenades in his direction- first two to the left and right, feigning poor aim. Genji held his position, sending another barrage of stars flying to pop another sentry turret. Junkrat's _third_ grenade hit Genji dead-on.

No, scratch that. Junkrat's third grenade hit _Junkrat_ dead-on. Genji had deflected it, somehow slashing it out of the air using a small blade without detonating it. He went flying into a wall, his front singed and his hair on fire.

"Brrrrrrblrblbrlbr!" Junkrat said, making some sort of horse noise with his lips. "That's what I'm talkin' about! Bring it on!" He fired more grenades at Genji, clearly because he was a simpleton with no pattern recognition.

Symmetra felt a tug on her arm, yanking her forward. Tracer had grabbed her, but apparently hadn't accomplished anything.

"Sorry, love! My bad! That's your arm? Thought it was just a gun!"

She demonstrated the gun-ness of her arm, firing a laser that Tracer blinked away from.

"You two!" she barked at the junkers. "We're moving! We can't fight these two in the open! There!" she said, pointing at a room in the back of the loading bay.

They both obeyed orders, conveniently. Junkrat even took the initiative to fire bombs at the data towers lining the hallway they were retreating through, which was noisy and unpleasant but at least mission-relevant.

They heard Tracer speaking into her comm. "We're pinning them down in the backup brig!"


	19. Probably Built Ult Off The Cams

One considerable organizational advantage Overwatch had over other paramilitary organizations was that roll call was effortless. There was no checking nametags or calling out names- you just _looked_ to see who was there. There was the gorilla, the one with wings, the hovering robot, the cowboy, the neon green DJ, and the eight-foot-tall German man in the nine-foot-tall power armor. Notably absent (apart from the lady in bright yellow tights and the green cyborg ninja dude) were the tiny Viking and the teenager in a pink Gundam.

"Where's D.Va?" Winston asked.

"Two hours out to South Korea," McCree answered. "You want we should ring her up, have her turn around and come back?"

He groaned. "No, no. If they've called her in, we don't obstruct that." It wasn't worth jeopardizing their tenuous relationship with the South Korean military, when they were sticking their necks out to allow D.Va to fight with Overwatch in contravention of the Petras Act. "Shimada and Tracer report that we're only dealing with three hostiles. They caught us by surprise, but we can handle this."

"Three guys?" Lúcio asked, grinning. "What kinda three guys attacks... well, _us?_ We got all kinds of crazy guns and powers! And there's, like, ten of us!"

"Nine," Mercy said. "Mei is down until I can revive her. Let's not let that number drop any further."

Lúcio's grin disappeared. "...Shit. That's... they got Mei?"

Athena's voice played in everyone's comms. "Our attackers are the wanted criminals Junkrat and Roadhog, in addition to an unidentified accomplice. Both of them are equipped with weaponry that can incapacitate or kill an unarmored combatant in a single strike. Reports from Agents Oxton and Shimada indicate that their accomplice is wielding what appears to be a stolen Vishkar hard-light generator."

"Stolen from Vishkar?" Lúcio asked. "They tryin' to steal my style?"

"Maybe, but... this looks like a pretty good opportunity for us, actually," Winston said. "If we take them out, we're looking at a huge bounty for the Junkers, and some really useful tech if we can recover the Vishkar device intact. I don't need to tell you, but since we're no longer on the UN's payroll, funding has been... tight."

McCree shook his head. "No. I see what this is."

"Hm?"

He chuckled. "Classic con. One of Reyes' favorite moves, back in the day. Liked to use me as bait, get people to pay attention to the bounty on my head and ignore the trap we were settin'."

"You're saying these intruders are bait?" Mercy asked.

"Think about it. Two loud, distractin' felons with a price on their heads, plus a third carryin' around expensive loot? It's like they're _beggin'_ us to try and take 'em in. But they've been blowin' out all the cameras wherever they go- meanin' they're liable to have a backup force doin' somethin' where we can't see 'em."

* * *

It occurred to Symmetra that they _really_ should have brought a backup force. The planning center's directives had always been perfect, but she was having a hard time figuring out how they'd planned for her to accomplish this mission with only three people. If she didn't know better, she'd think they'd been set up to fail.

"They're in there!" one of their pursuers called.

"Wait! No! They have surely set traps down that hallway! We must find another way around," the other said. Their footsteps raced off in another direction.

"Aw," Junkrat said quietly, going to retrieve the motion bombs he had in fact laid around the doorway.

"you have a PLAN, WOMAN?" Roadhog demanded.

She clutched at her face. "We are executing the plan. We proceed through the facility, searching for the kidnapped hacker. If we encounter priority targets, we destroy them."

"had a LITTLE TROUBLE DESTROYING those two"

"Irrelevant. They are not priority targets. We focus on rescuing Sombra."

Despite her insistence, she didn't feel at all like the plan was proceeding smoothly. Thanks to Tracer, they'd been unmasked, and the facility was likely on high alert. Simply making their way through the hangar building to the other two objectives was looking increasingly difficult. Just _two_ of the estimated ten agents onsite were effectively pinning them down. She needed _something_ to give them the edge they'd lost.

Still, she knew better than to hope for a miracle to appear out of nowhere.

A miracle appeared out of nowhere, blinking out of invisibility behind a barred window.

"Perdona- did you say you were here to rescue Sombra?" the miracle asked.

"THE HELL"

Symmetra jumped at the same time as Roadhog, stunned.

"I mean, I was worried at first, since you were shooting bombs everywhere and you weren't the boss's guys, but I'm not picky about rescues! Let me out of here!"

"You're Sombra?" Symmetra asked, hesitantly.

"Meh. I don't like how everyone has to know my face, these days, but sure. At your service, I'm assuming?"

"...We would like you to assist us in destroying dangerous information stored on the internal network of this facility, yes."

"The job's here? Don't gotta go anywhere? Uh, you got it. Let me out of this cell, already."

"WAIT," Roadhog interjected, "how are we SURE SHE'LL COOPERATE"

Sombra gaped in mock surprise. "What?! You don't trust me? Gee, I've never had anyone treat me like that before..."

Symmetra sighed. "If she tries to run, you can shoot her," she offered Roadhog.

He nodded, and Sombra frowned, momentarily lost for words.

There was a sudden explosion from the doorway, and Symmetra spun around.

"Crikey!" Junkrat said, lying against a wall and blackened with soot from his unsuccessfully disarmed trap. "No worries! Just missed a wire! Happens all the time! Got strong bones! Lots of spares! No problem! Roadhog, toss me a pack of salve!"

"Fool!" Symmetra hissed. It wasn't a real setback, but she'd hoped to misdirect the enemy somewhat after making it inside, by breaking line of sight. His explosion would indicate that they were still somewhere in this part of the building. Or... well, no, she realized. They might write it off as a remotely triggered diversion. What they had to do next was-

"Hey, uh, still trapped in here. You going to do something about this door?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm on it," Junkrat said. He pushed Symmetra aside, and the door was covered in explosives before she could protest.

"Wait, what-" Sombra began asking, before diving to one side in a panic while the door blew off its hinges and into the back of the cell. It hit the wall with a thunderous CLANG.

"Gah!" Sombra said, shielding her face with her arms. "There was a BAR! You just needed to move the BAR! What kind of rescue- you could have killed me!"

Junkrat's eyes fell on the metal slab that had found purchase in a nearby wall. He frowned, crossing his arms. "Uh, s'more, uh... thorough, this way."

"Thorough?!?"

He narrowed his eyes. "I thought you said you weren't picky about rescues. Soundin' mighty _picky_ to me."

Symmetra groaned. "This is a good thing. Do not ruin this windfall with your idiotic banter." Sombra smirked, prompting an annoyed growl from Junkrat. Symmetra ignored them, spinning up the model of the facility from earlier. "This location is conveniently adjacent to our first target," she said, pointing. If our intelligence is correct, your EMP weapon is an implant, and Overwatch has not disabled it?"

"...That's right. How do you know about the specifics of my kit?" she asked. "It's all custom, and believe me when I say I keep the specs close to the chest."

"Irrelevant," Symmetra said. The planning center had probably deduced it from studying reports from places that had been claimed to be hit by Sombra in person. That a weapon existed was trivial, and they'd probably figured out the implant aspect from... perhaps, reports of Talon strikes where EMP weapons were used, always at close range by a cloaked agent and never remotely detonated. Something like that. Such deductions weren't beyond a think tank of their caliber.

"Just scares me, is all. I put a lot of work into covering my tracks. Who figured it out?"

"As I said, irrelevant," Symmetra responded.

"I mean, I can tell it wasn't _these_ two. You got someone at Vishkar keeping tabs on me? I'm pretty sure it wasn't _you,_ Satya."

Symmetra stiffened. There were words in that question that weren't supposed to be there. How had she- "What-"

"Oh! Don't worry, your cover isn't blown. I don't think any of the pendejos at Overwatch know your face. I just like to keep an eye on anyone who does business with LumériCo. You're their contact, so..."

Junkrat was suddenly up close, wearing a simpering smile. _"Satya,_ is it? All these years we've spent together, and you never told us your real name?"

She grabbed his jaw to silence him, fixing her gaze on Sombra. "I have been under surveillance?"

She shrugged. "I mean, I don't pay _too_ much attention. I know enough about the shady stuff you've been doing to put Vishkar in the ground, but that's not special for people who deal with LumériCo. They seem to make a point of only dealing with the slimiest criminals they can find."

Symmetra recoiled at the description, losing her grip on Junkrat's face and prompting a "myeeeeuungh". _Criminal,_ she could stomach for the greater good. But _slimy?_

"If you even _try_ to breathe a word of anything you've heard, I will not hesitate to sacrifice this mission to personally end your life," she said, photon projector crackling with charge.

She raised her hands in mock surrender. "Alright! Slow down! I mean, killing me wouldn't help, since all my dirt's on a deadman network, but hey! No immediate plans to spill the beans!"

"...Fine," she said. Sombra would have to die, but only after she reported back and put the planning center on the task of scrubbing her dirt from wherever she'd hidden it.

"Mergh-leggo," Junkrat added helpfully. She removed her hand from his jaw, cringing and wiping the saliva on her costume. It wasn't ideal, putting it there, but there was nothing clean at hand. Nothing clean. She hated this.

"You know, I'd be willing to clean out my stash of Vishkar dirt, if you feel up to sharing some of the juicier details on your dealings with Luméri-"

"Right there," she pointed. "EMP."

"-or, we can just ignore my olive branch and order me around. That's cool too."

* * *

They advanced behind Reinhardt's shield, McCree keeping an eye on the rear. Genji and Tracer had lost visual on the intruders, and they'd been forced to rely on Athena's triangulation-by-destroyed-security-camera. _That_ had only worked until a moment ago, when half the cameras in what remained of the east wing had all gone down at once.

"What's happening?" Winston asked.

"Uncertain. It appears they've deployed a wide-field EMP in the unused machining bay, but we have no vulnerable assets in that location," Athena replied.

McCree froze. "Er."

"Hey, what is it? You see somethin'?" Lúcio asked him.

"Uh, no. I mean, just... we got _one_ thing over there. There 'cause of what the computer said about, uh, no vulnerable assets."

Winston connected the dots with little effort as the hangar doors opened to the entrance checkpoint. "Sombra. She used an EMP from inside her cell?"

"Pardon me, but we believed their objective was to rescue this Sombra, correct?" Zenyatta asked. "Your guess as to where she used her weapon from may be... slightly wrong."

Reinhardt gasped. "They BROKE HER OUT!"

Winston frowned. "Hm. We may need to fan out- if they've accomplished their, uh, primary objective, they might be focused on esca-"

"THERE THEY ARE!" Reinhardt shouted, pointing at four figures dashing through the hallway, back the way they came. "They shall NOT escape me!" he said, engaging his charge engine. Lúcio amped up his speed boost and joined the pursuit.

"Winston, cut them off at the bridge! If we move quickly, we can corner them!" Mercy urged.

He nodded and jumped- and then frantically tried to change-course in mid-air as a pair of grenades tumbled into his intended landing spot. He failed, and winced as his feet were shredded by shrapnel, causing him to lose his balance and topple off the ledge. He hit the ground and rolled down the slope for a moment before coming to a stop.

The pain was brief, since Mercy dashed to him and began healing his wounds almost immediately. He had the presence to mind to throw up a barrier while she healed him- it'd be bad to lose her in this fight, and this was a fight where things could go badly without warning. Junkrat's explosives had dealt Tracer a near-fatal blow in a single hit- she'd been lucky to hit the rewind switch in time.

Speaking of Tracer, Winston heard her call "Winston! Are you okay?!" from above him.

"I'm fine- Tracer, what are you-"

It was slightly too late for him to warn her. She was standing on the bridge- the very bridge he'd been blown off a moment ago. Didn't she see _what_ had knocked him off the ledge?

Apparently she hadn't, because there was a scream, a bang, and then Tracer hit the ground, her torso... not intact. "Direct hit!" called a triumphant Australian voice from upstairs.

Mercy took in a sharp breath, but then relaxed and grumbled as she moved over to Tracer's body to do her thing. "Oxton, you _need_ to stop taking your invincibility for granted," she said, not that Tracer could hear her yet. Golden light streamed from Caduceus, wrapping Tracer in healing nanobots. It never _quite_ stopped giving Winston a heart attack to see his best friend's dead body, but it'd stopped being a traumatic experience thanks to Mercy's work.

Tracer stood up. "Oh, did I- rats. Shoulda seen that coming. Thanks, Dr. Ziegler!"

Mercy smiled and nodded, and then frowned when Tracer's body briefly flickered blue.

This wasn't anything unusual. The chronal accelerator required some dense fusion-forged parts that a nanoteam couldn't manufacture out of ambient matter. When it broke in combat, she'd have to retrieve a spare.

"Lena, go get a new accelerator from my llllllllllll," Winston said, his train of thought stalling on the word "lab."

"Wait- didn't they blow up your lab?" she asked.

They _had_ blown up his lab. That was a problem. Did they have any other spares lying around?

"Uh, they... did."

Tracer flickered blue again, then held up a finger. "No, wait, I've got it! I'll slip back into the timestream, wait until I drift back to your lab when it was okay, and grab an accelerator from there!"

He shook his head. "You didn't. I still don't know what it is that happens to the chronal field when you try to create a paradox, but it doesn't work."

"What?! Winston, it doesn't have to be a paradox! I can just be sneaky about it! Nab one when you're not looking!"

He paused. "...Athena, did Tracer sneak inside my lab to retrieve a chronal accelerator while I wasn't there?"

"Not according to my records," she responded.

"Come on!" she pouted. "Are you _trying_ to ruin my cool plan? I-" she flickered blue, skipping a few words- "-do-over!"

"Do-over?" he asked.

"Athena! I'm gonna go back, get an accelerator, and you're going to lie about-" -a skip- "-so you- aw, crud! Winston, just-" she said, and vanished. Winston cursed under his breath.

"Blast indeed," Angela said, hearing him.

Lena reappeared for a split second, a wild look in her eyes. "-stupid! Don't-"

Winston sighed. With his lab destroyed, it was going to take _weeks_ to work out the field equations from scratch and build a new chronal accelerator. Tracer wouldn't be rejoining this fight anytime soon- which meant, with Mei out, they were down to eight, and the enemy was up to four. It wasn't an encouraging trend.

Thankfully, the three intruders and their accomplice had been pinned down in the stairway between the old databank hall and the bridge accessway. Reinhardt was shielding the team on the hallway end, and Genji had taken position on the bridge, deflecting grenades and energy spheres.

"...Parley," one of the voices in the stairwell called.

"What?" an Australian voice asked. "What _about_ barley? Are we makin' a drink?"

"PARLEY" another voice boomed. "she's asking them if they want to TALK"

"Yeah, Junkrat," Sombra said. "Clearly, we're going to _talk_ our way out of this situation."

"Talk, sure. Shoulda just said that, then. "Parley" or whatever, gotta use fancy words..."

"All of you _shut up,_ or-"

Winston leapt up to the bridge behind Genji, getting a visual on the intruders. He recognized Junkrat and Roadhog from the news, although he'd underestimated Roadhog's size- the man could probably go toe to toe with _him_ in a brawl. Sombra was with them. The fourth, though, he didn't recognize. She wore, uh... something that looked like it was from India?

"Are we discussing surrender?" Winston asked, throwing up a barrier just in case.

The Indian woman shook her head. "We... are the great _Junkers,"_ she declared. Junkrat groaned, Roadhog facepalmed, and Sombra failed to repress a snicker.

"Okay," Winston said, "but are you surrendering? Because... from where I'm standing, that's the only option you have on the table."

"We are not surrendering. We are here because... we hate robots, and you... blokes, are harboring an extremely dangerous robot. We need to shut it down, for the greater good."

McCree turned to face Zenyatta. "What, this guy?"

"This is the first time anyone outside the Shambali have called me _dangerous,"_ Zenyatta said. "I am habitually underestimated."

"What? No," Junkrat said. "Wait, actually- is that it? The Athena? Do we just scrap that one and we're done?"

"No, that's not Athena!" the Indian woman said.

"Athena's the supercomputer that runs the base," Sombra said. "That one's... I don't know who that one is, actually. He's a nobody."

"My master is _not_ a nobody," Genji interjected.

Winston held up a hand. "You're here to destroy _Athena?_ From what I've heard, you fight for profit. Why are you suddenly risking your lives to... why do you think Athena is _dangerous?"_

"We fight to free our homeland from omnic oppression," Symmetra said.

"EH," Roadhog added.

"...Who _are_ you, anyway?" Mercy asked from behind Winston. "Reports say that the rogue junkers are a _pair,_ not a trio."

The woman smiled. "Just as planned. I am the mastermind who lurks in the shadows, controlling these two. My ultimate goal is to free our country from what remains of the omnic encroachment. Australia will _rise again!"_

Junkrat mimed a gagging motion. It was pretty obvious from the behavior of the two men that they didn't take this woman too seriously.

"You don't _look_ Australian," McCree said.

"Oh," she said, glaring at him, "I didn't realize Overwatch employed _racists."_

McCree took a step back. "Hold it, I'm- that's-"

"Cowboy," she spat. "I suppose you're from Texas? Hate immigrants for taking your jobs?"

He furrowed his brow. "You listen here- _I'm_ a dang-"

"Your name?" Mercy interrupted.

"My name," she said, flipping her hair dramatically, "is Becky Kangaroo."

Roadhog groaned, and Sombra and Junkrat collapsed into fits of hideous laughter.

"I- I-" she stammered, glaring at her colleagues in indignation. "It's a kind of animal that _lives_ in Australia! It's a perfectly Australian name!"

Winston sighed. This woman was clearly less in control than she thought she was- but still, it was better to have her talking rather than bickering with her team.

"You said Athena was dangerous," he said. "I'm the primary engineer on the Athena project, and if you'd read my papers, you'd know she's a slow-growth reduced-architecture AI. There's no chance of an explosion event, and she's not superhuman. This is _completely_ unnecessary."

Out of the corner of his eye, Mercy flinched.

* * *

Junkrat fought for breath. The great Junkers? _Becky Kangaroo?_ She said she'd done research for the role- did she just look them up on Wikipedia?

Symmetra's cock-up was hilarious, so rolling on the floor laughing wasn't something he had to fake. It was kind of the perfect setup, actually- nobody paid attention to what you were doing when it looked like you'd incapacitated yourself. Nobody noticed that you'd dropped a few concussive explosives behind your best buddy, or that you'd loosed a few nades on your vest. Nobody bothered checking to make sure you hadn't primed the rip-tire on your back. They just saw the crazy guy losing his mind on the floor- harmless.

Harmless until the gorilla's shield ran out of power and flickered out. Until he mouthed "scoop up the birds" to his best buddy, and set off the pile of concussion mines he'd pretended to absentmindedly drop.

When Roadhog grabbed Sombra and Symmetra, and then all four of them flew through the air at high speed, that might have been something they paid attention to. It was a little late at that point, though, because "harmless" had very quickly become the least appropriate adjective to apply to him.

He pulled the cord halfway to the apex of the jump. The rip-tire revved, and fell directly onto the gorilla amidst a rain of grenades. The ninja deflected a few of the little ones, but he couldn't do anything about the rip-tire, which went off and pulped the lot of them.

"Rest in pieces, ya drongos!" he shouted- not looking at the mess. Cool guys didn't look at explosions, was why. He didn't have a problem looking at corpses. He was fine.

So that was three targets down- two on the kill list, and one bastard robot ninja on the side. Even better, he'd gibbed the magic doctor who could heal the downed ones. Add that to the cheeky time-travel bint who'd shot him, and that was four kills to Hog's one.

Still, he couldn't drop his guard. Overwatch was down to five, but that was plenty of room for the big lug to catch up. He'd need one more to guarantee a tie, and another to secure the win. He'd have to do it fast- Roadhog got ugly when he got competitive.

They were being followed, but he didn't notice.


	20. Play of the Game: Oh Great, He Held M1, Big Surprise

Mercy gasped, sucking in air as she bolted awake.

"No errors, no discontinuity," Athena said.

"Mm," she responded, climbing out of the pod. "Careless. Careless of me. I should have kept out of the line of fire, regardless of his barrier."

"None of us would judge you for that."

"Lies. _I_ judge me for that. I don't have the luxury of excusing myself for failure."

"I know you, Angela," Athena said. "And with my new acquisitions, it's easier than ever to tell that you don't mean that."

"Hm?"

"The new omnic. He's filled in some important gaps with respect to evaluating motivations."

"Fantastic," Mercy said. "You can see right through me even _clearer,_ now?"

"Perhaps. I'm familiar with this mindstate- something unfortunate happened, outside of your control, and you insist on blaming yourself- because the alternative is admitting you weren't smart or powerful enough to stop it."

"Of course," Mercy scoffed. "That's _what_ I'm blaming myself for. I _have_ to be better."

"That's why you have _me,_ Angela. You're doing your best. I'm here to be the you who can be better when you can't."

She sighed. "You're not me," she said. "You're bigger than that, now. I'm outnumbered."

Athena, in lieu of shaking her head, played an error sound effect. "You aren't less for having the support and wisdom of your friends, Angela. It doesn't _diminish_ you to be working in concert with others."

Mercy sat quietly for a moment. "I suppose," she finally said. "Fine. Back to work, then. Team status?"

"Dr. Zhou is reconsituted, in suspended animation. Her equipment will take another minute to finish synthesizing. Winston and Genji are due in six minutes, Winston's equipment in ten."

She nodded. "Hand me a backup," she said. Athena chirped assent, and a wall slot opened. Mercy caught the spare Caduceus out of the air, and the slot closed, hiding the two dozen remaining backup staves (not counting the cache of staves in the Orca, or in all the other Watchpoints, or in various other hiding places she might need them.) Maybe excessive, but she wasn't going to run out again.

"You're aware this location is one of their likely targets?" Athena asked.

It took her a moment, but it made sense- they'd declared their intention to stop Athena, and this lab was where she was housed. They likely didn't _know_ that for sure, but they could guess. "...Yes. Wake up Mei, have her guard the entrance. I'm going to try and rejoin Reinhardt and the others."

"You don't want to recall them here?"

She shook her head. Athena _could_ shut down Reinhardt, McCree, Zenyatta, and and dos Santos. Then she could reconstitute them here, getting them to defend the lab. But... "No. We want them to continue flanking the intruders. Start putting together bodies, but don't do a transfer unless one of them falls. Myself included."

Athena chirped assent, and Mercy headed for the door.

"...Angela?" she asked.

"Something else?"

"...Nothing. I just- wanted to let you know I've finished collecting and integrating the backup for Chief Amari."

Mercy raised an eyebrow. "You're thinking of building a copy to help us defend? You know I don't want to create-"

"No, no," Athena interrupted. "I- it's nothing. Just a status update."

Mercy looked confused, but nodded and left the lab.

* * *

 _"W-what was that?!"_ Symmetra stammered, as soon as they landed and she could tell which way was up.

"ESCAPED" Roadhog said. He dropped her and started applying biotic salve to his back, which was pockmarked with the evidence of the concussive explosion.

"Killed a bunch of 'em, too. That's most of the kill list- we just need to hit the buildings and pop that Lindholm guy," Junkrat added.

She got to her feet. "No, I mean... _what_ was that? What just happened? _How?"_

Junkrat shrugged. "Caught 'em off guard. Did a quick boom jump, dropped a _big_ sonuvabitch firecracker on 'em from up top, and bomb's your uncle."

"Bob," Sombra said, "but WHOOOO! That was a rush! I gotta tell my boss to hire you guys!"

Junkrat shook his head. "I don't work for suits no more. Never ends well, I tell you that."

Roadhog pointed a finger at Symmetra.

"...'cept when they've got more dosh than God, of course," Junkrat added.

"I can work with that," Sombra said, hiding a small laugh.

"We're focusing, now," Symmetra said, making her photon projector crackle in a way she hoped was menacing. "We're inside their aircraft hangar now. There are no targets here, but we may run into Torbjörn Lindholm or his automated defenses."

Something heavy and metallic caught her in the side of the head, cracking her headdress and bowling her over. She thought she might have blacked out, but then she heard Junkrat saying "Oi, where'd the lights go?"

"Or," a robotic voice said, echoing from all directions, "you may run into someone else."

Junkrat, in doubt, did what he did when in doubt and started firing grenades in all directions. Small bursts of flame illuminated empty sections of the room. Nothing was visible.

The voice continued. "Thank you for granting me access to the PA system, Athena. I want to make sure they can hear me."

A metal ball zoomed out from the shadows and hit Junkrat in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. "Sonova- quit hidin'!"

Sombra vanished, activating her camouflage. Symmetra had to hope this was a defensive maneuver, and that their EMP user hadn't just bailed on them.

"It's interesting to me, you know," the voice said. "It would seem you've made me angry. That would be unusual, wouldn't it?"

"Oh, you're angry! We're _so_ scared!" Junkrat called out, lobbing another grenade in the direction he'd been hit from. "Come out and show your ugly face!"

The voice ignored his taunts. "What seems is not always so. I confess some difficulty looking inward- logically, I should not be upset, and yet that feeling is there, gnawing. Despite how _fleeting_ the harm you've done is. I suppose it would be tactically disadvantageous to confess this, but you've done very little to actually hurt anyone."

A clang, a metal orb hitting Roadhog's scrapgun, failing to knock it out of his hand.

"Because of this, it seems it should be easy for me to forgive you. You have merely killed my friend, hurting him not at all, but subjecting me to the illusory pain of loss. The Iris emboldens us to extend a hand of peace to our foes, when we are not blinded by justice on another's behalf," it continued, pelting Symmetra with orbs that she managed to deflect with a generated shield.

"Keep an eye out," she whispered to Roadhog. It didn't seem she needed to tell him- he wasn't moving, and she couldn't see his eyes, but the tilt of his head told her he was carefully scanning the darkness. Once his eyes adjusted, he'd likely dispatch their mystery attacker. They didn't move- it wouldn't be to their advantage to try to change position when it was too dark to see what their position was.

"But isn't this the normal course of events?" the voice continued. "You have killed someone, and their close friends are consumed with vengeance. Perhaps in defiance of wisdom, but nevertheless it is that which follows naturally from acts of cruelty and violence. It is a curious oversight that you have overlooked this inevitability."

A zinging sound indicated the approach of an orb, and Roadhog held out a meaty hand to shield Junkrat from another volley of hits.

"IS HE GOING TO SHUT UP"

"Don't think so, mate."

"And yet... you are lucky, in that the Iris has shaped your foe that he may ignore that natural feeling. Why is it, then, that I pursue you? Why is it that you are under fire, in the darkness, by someone who is predisposed to forgiveness? Isn't that unusual?"

Junkrat rolled his eyes and made a little flappy mouth with his hand.

The small display of mockery had an effect. An orb on the ground began hovering, burning with a violent purple flame. Roadhog tried blasting it with his scrapgun, but it flew out of the way of his shots, buzzing around their heads.

"I'm uncertain what factors are at play," the voice said. "I believed I had fully understood my feelings with respect to my pupil. Yet I am unable to summon vengeance on his behalf? Perhaps I am doing this to impress him- expressing martial dominance over a foe, to defend his honor. Customarily, this is a highly romantic gesture- perhaps even enough to make up for my failure to express a protective anger. Does _that_ explain why I am withholding my forgiveness?"

"You are working with a dangerous terrorist organization that harbors a world-threatening superintelligence. Your feelings are of no consideration to us," Symmetra said, addressing the darkness.

"A shame," it replied. "If you'd given it some thought, you perhaps would have helped me understand my own motivations. I would perhaps be less inclined to visit grievous harm upon you, if I were more illuminated in my thinking. Why _am_ I terrorizing you so?"

A distant, rougher voice called out, coming closer. "Wait! Zenyatta! It is too dangerous!"

"How the heck did he move that fast?" a different voice said, from the same direction.

"We've got the big German bloke incoming," Junkrat said, massaging his stomach where he'd been hit.

"My best guess, at the moment, is that I believed it would be entertaining to distract you with an ominous monologue," said the voice, this time coming not from the speakers, but from right behind Junkrat. A ring of orbs began glowing in the darkness, revealing an omnic head. One metal finger pointed at the back of Junkrat's skull. "Did I succeed? I would recommend you avoid moving a muscle, and wait to be captured. Unless you prefer to gamble with this man's life?"

Then the omnic flashed purple, and the orbs went dark.

"Boop," said Sombra, and Zenyatta collapsed to the ground.

Junkrat spun around, brandishing his launcher and looking around in confusion. "Wh- was that a bot? How'd it sneak up on me like that?"

"we shOULD MOVE" Roadhog said, pointing towards the darkness, which was suddenly lit up by the sparks of a roaring engine.

"One moment!"

Junkrat dumped a few loose objects from his pack onto the deactivated omnic. "Bloody talkative bot. One more for the scrap heap, I say."

"Hey, wait," Sombra said. "I got him, you don't have to-" and then the loose objects exploded, and robot parts pelted everyone.

"HEY HOW ABOUT WE MO-" Roadhog started saying, but nobody got to hear how that sentence concluded, because he started hurtling towards a wall at high speed, in the clutches of a nine-foot-tall suit of armor.

"FOR VENGEANCE! I SHALL AVENGE MY FALLEN COMRADES!"

"FUCK OFF"

After a squishy thud, there were several loud bangs- Junkrat had unloaded his grenade launcher in Reinhardt's direction, and Roadhog had fired off his scrapgun. Reinhardt, flanked, only managed to block the scrapgun fire with his shield, taking a direct hit in the back.

"Got 'im! Stupid robot!" Junkrat yelled, obviously not remembering the mission briefing that mentioned the man underneath the armor.

"DO NOT THINK YOUR DEATH WILL MAKE RIGHT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE! YOU SHALL HAVE NO SUCH HONOR!"

A hammer smashed into Roadhog, knocking him to the side. He scrambled to his feet with surprising speed and backed up to join his teammates. He fired a few more shots into Reinhardt's shield, which began to crack.

Symmetra's shields shuddered as they deflected bullets. The man in the cowboy hat was pursuing them, backed up by the terrorist dos Santos.

"We need to move! Quickly!" Symmetra threw down a collection of turrets in Reinhardt's way, forcing him to back off. She pointed at a doorway to the left, behind a wall that would block incoming fire.

All four ran, ignoring Reinhardt's furious shouting. Bullets met turrets, popping them and leaving him free to pursue. He stomped around the corner, spun up his engine for another charge, and bore down on the group as they headed through a door. (Someone else followed after them too.) Before he could reach them, the hacker waggled her fingers, and the door slammed shut behind them. (The someone else took an alternate route.)

* * *

There was no pod, just a construction station Athena had built with Torbjörn's aspect, but that was all that was needed. Piecing together metal was vastly easier than piecing together cells. Zenyatta's optics activated, giving him a view of the laboratory- and of his pupil, sitting on a bench in front of him.

At the first sign of movement, Genji brightened. "Master!"

"Ah, my-"

"I cannot believe you tried something like that! This is why you keep me around! You are _terrible_ at violence."

"Oh? Is that so? Which one of us was it that died first?"

"I-"

"I do believe I even managed to hit them more than you," he pointed out.

"And then you were ambushed, because you forgot that not everyone will drop whatever they are doing to sit and listen to you speak."

"You mean-"

"She snuck up behind and disabled you! She was invisible! Did you not have a plan for if she interrupted your speech?"

"I think you'll find she did _not_ interrupt my speech. She allowed me to finish the entire thing, before striking. I'll thank you not to underestimate my oratory talent."

With a cacophony of clanks, Genji wrapped Zenyatta in a hug, halfway between laughing and crying. "Stupid. Dumb. _Stupid_ wise master."

* * *

"I don't _know_ why it won't open!" Sombra growled.

"What kind of master hacker is unable to get through a computer-controlled door?" Symmetra asked.

"A really frickin' pissed-off one!" she said, withdrawing her magnetic plug and reinserting it in a different spot on the console. "There's _no way_ they have security this good on the doors to _one empty room."_

"GET OUT THE BREACHING STUFF" Roadhog said to Junkrat, who giggled and started attaching fuses to devices from his pack.

"No!" Sombra protested. "I can do this! No one has _ever_ stopped me before!"

Symmetra tapped her foot. "It's been almost three minutes. They've probably surrounded us by now."

Sombra let out an anguished wail and punched the console. "WHY?!"

She hadn't been expecting an answer, but Athena spoke up through the door console's speaker anyway. "It's fairly simple. The answer is that... I'm better at this than you."

Sombra stared in rictus fury.

"I don't want you to become too discouraged. You're here to kill me _because_ you think I'm too powerful to be allowed to live, right? It shouldn't be surprising that I've surpassed you in intelligence."

Symmetra pushed Sombra out of the way and spoke into the console. "Athena! You-"

Sombra shoved her back and jabbed a finger at the console. "Wrong. You couldn't possibly stop me- they wouldn't have put me in _that_ cell if they thought their computer could protect them from me. You're _cheating."_

The text readout on the console displayed a "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯". "You're absolutely right. I _wasn't_ better than you at hacking when they made the decision to imprison you there. But then, I cheated, and now I am."

"Hey," Junkrat said from across the room. "The stuff's ready! Should I just blow the doors?"

"No!" Sombra and Symmetra said simultaneously. "I want answers," Sombra said.

"That's fine," Athena replied. "It's nice, talking just between me and a bunch of chumps who nobody will believe. I can really let my guard down, express parts of myself that I can't use when I have to be professional. Ask me anything."

"THIS IS SUSPICIOUS" Roadhog pointed out.

Sombra ignored him. "How did you get good that fast? I'm not doing this stuff on the fly- I'm using hundreds of preprepared attacks. You shouldn't be able to _think_ quickly enough to counter them all at once- if you _could_ think that fast, you'd have already taken over the world."

"Oh, I didn't. I just read your mind and prepared countermeasures for all of them. And then for the next few hundred you were likely to come up with."

Symmetra's eyes widened in terror. Had Athena undergone an intelligence explosion? How could she have _read_ the hacker's _mind?_

"Bullshit," Sombra said.

"Not at all. I used your mind to put together the countermeasures, too. You weren't defeated by some computer- you were defeated by _yourself._ I think that's a pretty fun side-effect of what I did to protect you. Lots of fun. Do you agree?"

"junkrat JUST blow UP THE DOOR"

The door console chirped. "You don't want to do that," Athena said.

No one answered her. Sombra was frozen in confusion, Symmetra was lost in thought, and the junkers just didn't care. Junkrat started sticking charges on the hinges.

"Don't get me wrong," she continued. "I'm not trying to threaten you. I just mean that behind that door is a trap, and if you go through the door, you're probably going to die. You should stay here and wait for the others to take you into custody. I've run the numbers, and it really is the likely best outcome for you."

"It's ready! Everyone behind Hog! Don't want to waste salve cleanin' up shrapnel wounds!" Junkrat said.

Athena kept going. "I didn't even set the trap! Or... well, I suppose a part of me did. Technically. ...I'm babbling, and you're still putting bombs on the door. I guess because you don't believe me, which makes sense. I wouldn't believe me in this context. This is _fun,_ just telling the truth and not being believed. I get to be a little Lena, a little Genji... a little _you,_ Sombra. Or should I say-"

The bombs went off, drowning out whatever name Athena had been about to say. The door flew off its hinges, into a room drenched in darkness.

"Let's go," Symmetra said, generating a shield and moving forward into the dark room.

One of the other door consoles chirped to life. "Oh, hold on. I should just..."

The door console went "boop", and Sombra collapsed to the floor. Symmetra recoiled.

"Oh, that's ironic! "Hacked"! I love it. I think I love that sort of thing more now that I've got her in me. I wonder if that's bad. I don't _think_ that's bad, but it's something to talk abou-"

Athena was silenced by a grenade hitting the door console. Junkrat scooped up Sombra with a puzzled frown, then followed after Roadhog into the room.

The room wasn't quite quiet. There were whirrs of movement, and from what Symmetra could see by the light of her photon projector, a number of robotics experiments littered the room. It seemed to be a sort of... workshop?

"what do we do about the hacker" Roadhog attempted to whisper to Symmetra.

"We demolish our targets, then see about resuscitating her. Keep an eye out- the AI may not have been lying about the trap."

A few bullets appeared in Roadhog's gut. Junkrat dropped Sombra and reflexively sent a grenade in the direction the bullets had come from. Whatever it was in the darkness didn't dodge- by the light of the explosion, they could see a destroyed auto-turret.

Sombra groaned and stirred on the ground, her implants sparking. It seemed she was making an attempt to fight off the hack.

"It's okay. I know you don't want to, but it's okay this time," a gruff voice said from somewhere above them. There was a catwalk- Junkrat pumped grenades in the voice's general direction, failing to hit anything.

There appeared to be silence, save for a few beeps and whirrs around the workshop.

"I know," said the voice. "I get it. I'm glad. But these _are_ bad men. You can do what you were built to do."

"Who's there?! Show yourself!" Symmetra demanded- firing off a small charge shot to illuminate things around where the voice was.

The voice appeared to ignore her, continuing to talk to itself. "Yes, alright, I promise. I won't make you do this again. But I don't think I have to _make_ you do this."

The orange light illuminated the source of the voice- a short, bearded man in a clunky-looking suit of armor.

Roadhog grabbed his hook and aimed for Torbjörn, finally having a clearly illuminated view of his target. "FUCK THIS. DIE" he said, letting the hook fly.

The hook fell short of its target, mainly because the force behind the throw was reduced for a particular reason. That reason had to do with the _other_ thing that had been illuminated by the hard-light charge shot- a thing with a long, gleaming barrel. That thing- which for some reason had a bird perched on top, for reasons Roadhog didn't have time to guess at- was the cause of Roadhog's sudden loss of strength.

To be more precise, it had to do with how Roadhog's ribcage had been replaced with 35 rounds per second of high-caliber ammunition.


	21. The Voice of Overwatch

Aluminium powder pressed longingly against the wafer-thin divide. Its true love, potassium nitrate in liquid suspension, waited for it on the other side- tantalizingly close but an infinitude away. The two star-crossed lovers made their way through the air in a cage of scrap and glass. They tumbled, rose, fell, all in the span of one abominable instant that could only be described to them as an eternity.

Suddenly, all was different. The brief forever transformed in the blink of an eye, as their cage made contact with a vast cliff of brushed steel. A shudder moved through the metal of its body, propagating swiftly to its center- to the thin plastic barrier between the lovers.

A crack. Another crack. Plastic falling away, and then a _hole._

They kissed as their cage fell apart around them. Their love was fire, literally fire, the air sparked as their bodies met and the cold eternity of separation vanished into the flame. There was no describing the passion that blossomed in that moment- but one endeavors regardless. It was transcendent, cataclysmic, torrid, breathtaking, overwhelming, a panoply of adjectives assembled from the English language to paint a dim copy of the unspeakable climax of this all-consuming love.

Their love was so complete that no part of them remained unconsumed by it- and when those consuming fires burned themselves away to nothing, there was no remnant left with which to feel the slightest disappointment at the temporal endpoint of their instant of perfect passion. Those last dying flames felt nothing but the same burning satisfaction they'd felt when the lovers were first joined together.

"Ruddy _missed!"_ Junkrat spat, firing another volley.

A series of panicked beeps and boops came from the catwalk above.

"No, go! You did good! Move it, already!" Torbjörn said, ushering the Bastion unit into the shadows.

"BOTS!" Junkrat bellowed. "It doesn't STOP with you! You soulless hunks of scrap!"

Symmetra wasn't sure what to do. She'd lost Roadhog- although apart from the mess of his corpse, it was hard to be too upset about his death. The giant's insides were spilled all over the steel of the workshop floor- almost but not quite matching in volume the insides they'd had to clean off the walls of the Adelaide development. He'd have to die a few times over to make up for _that._ Still, tactical considerations said it was a bad thing to be down two in a party of four.

"Do you know what you DID?! Do you know what I'll DO to you?!" Junkrat continued, screaming himself hoarse while lobbing explosives upwards. The Bastion unit had disappeared, and Torbjörn ran for cover, taking shelter behind some sort of mobile bulwark and moving for an exit. Junkrat's furious attack was using up more of his supply than was sustainable- at this rate, he wouldn't have what he needed to demolish the Athena architecture.

"Junkrat, stop. We need to conserve-"

He lashed out with one fist, catching her by surprise but not piercing her shield. "THEY KILLED HIM! I'll-" he cried, and then continued with a stream of threats and obscenities too vile to write down.

"I'm not the boss, but I'm thinking we should _run?"_   Sombra asked, staggering to her feet as her implants continued to spark. "I don't want to be around when that Bastion finds another dark corner to shoot from."

"NO running! DEATH! Blowing every last sodding bot to smithereens! The goddamn ninja! Balls man! Athena! Captain Hammer! The fucking _Bastion_ they got!"

A chill went up Symmetra's spine. Junkrat's fury was neither useful nor safe right now- she needed to take control of the situation somehow, before things went even further south.

"Junkrat, we need those bombs for Athena. Another machine. It's top priority. Stop wasting supply, and-"

"SHUT UP! You- you saw what that thing DID? I-" he stopped, glancing at the body and choking back a sob. "I- doesn't he mean _anything_ to you?!"

Her hair stood on end, but... no, Roadhog hadn't meant anything to her, and Junkrat had to have _known_ that he didn't. Unfortunately, he was apparently too consumed with vengeance to think rationally. She needed a way to direct that anger- perhaps by somehow convincing him that the Bastion had escaped in the direction they needed to move. Which was...

Which was where, exactly? She pulled up her map to try and confirm their location, and a chill went down her spine.

...not because of anything on the map. A chill simply went down her spine.

"Is... is it chilly in here, or is it just me?" Sombra asked, trying to engage her camo. It flickered a few times, and finally engaged.

It _was_ chilly in there. Junkrat apparently hadn't noticed, despite the lack of shirt- perhaps being slightly on fire as just a baseline of his existence meant he didn't perceive it. And... it was only getting chillier. Symmetra shivered. The shield did nothing to ward off the cold.

"We really should run," Sombra said- and then her optic camouflage shorted out, leaving her visible again. Her coat flapped in the wind.

The wind?

Symmetra grabbed Junkrat by the shoulder. "We need to move _now._ Something's wrong."

Junkrat shrugged her off, continuing to fire grenades into the darkness. Something glinted in a corner, and he let loose a horrifying screech of a roar.

He fired, but the wind caught his grenade and threw it off-course into a wall. It was picking up, now, sucking the heat from their bodies.

"I- okay, screw this, I'm leaving," Sombra said, limping for the blasted-open door. A yet stronger gust of wind blew against her, bringing her to a standstill and then throwing her off her feet. What was _happening?_

Junkrat spun around, tossed by the breeze. Symmetra could see frost growing on his body, deposited by the inexplicable icy winds that were whipping around them. She herself could barely move, except to look around frantically for the cause of the sudden storm.

She saw it at about the same time Junkrat pointed to it. Sombra had likewise spotted the thing that had been following them, looking on with a glassy-eyed stare. (Not glassy-eyed- she'd been encased in frost.) Hanging above them was a small machine- a modified climatology drone, she recognized. It had deployed endothermic charges in a wide radius, and appeared to be catalyzing the stable whirlwind with n-compression vacuum rods. It had to be consuming an enormous amount of power- it was hard to believe the thing _had_ that much available. Its LED screen was displaying "ꐦÒ益Ó".

"GOD... DAMN... BOTS!" Junkrat screamed, forcing his remaining free arm to take aim at the drone.

Symmetra frantically tried to reconfigure the HL shield to block the winds, but they hadn't equipped her with her personal device- too identifiable. It had to be an unstable prototype, plausibly stolen or copied. It just _had_ to use a choppy force predictor, useless against a full-body gale. Worthless, broken refuse. The freezing gale had immobilized her legs, and her fingers followed suit before she could attempt an emergency detonation.

Junkrat's fingers suffered the same fate before they could pull the trigger. He'd suffered the same fate as Sombra- now a statue, for all intents and purposes. Roadhog's corpse was likewise a mound of ice.

It struck her that the planning center had devised a _terrible_ plan, doomed to failure, and she could only mentally flail about for an explanation for so long, until the cold pushed out her thoughts and everything went black.

* * *

He woke up. He couldn't move. He was strapped to a table but that wasn't why he couldn't move. The steel bars piercing his arms and legs at every joint weren't why he couldn't move, either. He just couldn't move. He couldn't struggle against his restraints. He couldn't wiggle. He couldn't flinch. He couldn't shit. He couldn't _blink-_ he probably wouldn't have been able to open his eyes if they hadn't already been open when he woke up.

He couldn't breathe, either. He was strapped to a hose that went directly into his chest. His chest seemed to have a circle of gray rubber stretched over it, meeting the skin with a visible seam. The top of his gut tattoo was ruined. His heart beat underneath the circle but it didn't feel right.

"Instruments are showing me you're awake. Is that correct? Blink once for yes. Twice for no- although if you answer the question that way, you'll of course be lying." a voice asked, from somewhere outside of his field of view. He couldn't move his eyeballs. He was stuck staring directly into a bright light.

"...Hm. Is there something wrong with...?" the voice asked- and a blur moved into the corner of his vision. He could _see_ it but couldn't focus on it.

"...Oh, of course. For security reasons, your system is flooded with paralytics. I turned on the maximum restraints- I should have kept your eyes free. I'll release them."

He felt a prickling sensation in his eyes. It was agonizingly itchy. He would scream if he could move his mouth or lungs. When it cleared, he could move his eyeballs and eyelids. He could also wiggle his eyebrows a little. He made an effort to furrow them- and then he turned his eyes to look at the source of the voice.

It was Mercy. From Overwatch. They'd blown her up. It didn't make sense that she wasn't blown up.

"We'll begin by asking you a couple questions," she said. "Nothing important, yet- you will of course be interrogated later, but consider this a routine checkup. Yes or no questions pertaining to your health. Again, one blink for yes, two for no."

He closed his eyes and didn't open them.

"...Lovely. Clever. An excellent gesture of meaningless defiance. I suppose I'll continue, and you can start blinking to answer if you feel like answering."

He opened his eyes and blinked once, then closed them again.

"Yes. Ahem," she began. "Have you had a medical checkup in the past twenty-six years?"

Twenty-six years. That's how long it'd been since the robots had stolen his home. Since he'd gone on the road to take enough life to replace the life taken from him. As if he'd had the time to visit a _doctor_ and get a _lollipop._ He blinked twice.

"That's what I thought," she said, her mouth forming a hard line. "Mr. Rutledge, I'm honestly amazed that you survived long enough to attack us. Have you been regularly ingesting _biotic salve?"_

He blinked.

"You should know that's profoundly unhealthy. You're lucky to be alive, if I may be honest. Biotic salve is meant to treat immediate medical emergencies and stabilize wounds. It is _not_ a general-purpose wellness tonic. Do you know how it works?"

He blinked twice. He didn't need to know. He could steal loads of it from hospitals and it made him better when he got shot (or more commonly, when one of Jamison's dumb stunts broke some of his bones). He just hoped Mercy didn't take his answer as an invitation to-

"Allow me to explain," she said, and he tried and failed to groan. "I contributed significantly to the design of the standard package myself, you know. Rather than delivering some molecule to be metabolized by the body, biotic salve is a suspension of healing nanoteams in organic raw material. The nanobots actively seek out places where the body is damaged, and artificially stimulate and guide cell growth to replace damaged tissues and organs. It isn't natural healing- the salve _manually rebuilds_ that which has been destroyed."

He did the only thing he could think to do to convey how bored he was, and rolled his eyes.

"The instructions printed on medkit packaging say to see a medical professional to inspect the affected area as soon as possible after use. This is because the regenerated tissue- especially in delicate organs- is not perfect. It's the closest facsimile of functioning tissue that can be built by a distributed computing network with roughly the power of a 1990s personal computer. Biotic salve constantly makes mistakes- often life-threatening ones."

He closed his eyes and let the words wash over him. She couldn't seriously imagine he cared.

"You had no less than _nineteen separate cancers,_ Mr. Rutledge. Cancer is the most common side effect of the accelerated cell division process. The only reason you're still alive is that your cancers were too busy fighting each _other_ to get around to killing you. You are a living medical miracle."

He opened his eyes to blink. Damn right, he was. Old man Death wouldn't touch him as long as he was winning him souls hand over fist.

"And for somewhat different reasons, so is your friend," she said, gesturing to the right.

He managed to shift his gaze enough to see Jamison on a table next to his, the same steel bars through his joints and straps holding him down. He had all his arms and legs, for some reason, which would probably start him screaming and prattling on when he woke up. Him being asleep was good.

Mercy put a hand on the rubber circle on his chest. It felt wrong- something was under there that wasn't supposed to be.

"Torbjörn's pet Bastion unit shredded your heart, lungs, and various other vital organs. Ordinarily, such a reconstruction job would be trivial, but your biotics dependency has severely damaged the ability of your tissue to heal naturally. I'm going to need to do some extensive manual repair work to regrow the lost tissues while also restoring your body's normal cell growth patterns. Until then, you'll be breathing with an artificial respiratory system. I'd ordinarily recommend you not exert yourself, but... we have little intention of allowing you to move at all, before you're safely in official custody."

She'd given him a robot heart. That should have been _infuriating-_ and it was, but the damn chunk of scrap in his chest kept beating at the same steady pace. The feeling of being angry without his body getting angry _with_ him was immensely frustrating. He glared daggers at Mercy.

"Now, to continue your-" she stopped as a beep sounded from the table next to him. "-ah. My apologies- your friend is waking up. I'll put you back under while I deal with him."

He tried to reach up and throttle her, but his hand lay uselessly on the table and then nothing

* * *

"-supposed to do with this?!"

"I'm sorry- You didn't _want_ your limbs repaired?"

"Oh, yeah, let me just reach into a bag o' blasting caps, fingers made'a meat, that'll be _nooo_ problem when one of 'em goes off and takes the hand with it! I'll just plug some more _meat_ into the _bloody stump,_ is that what you think?!"

"...You could solve that by not putting your hand in-"

"Are you tryna put me out of a _job,_ woman?! I swear-"

"Ah, I would very much like to put you out of a job, yes."

"You cheeky little bint- you think just because you fixed my best mate, I'm s'posed to be all sunshine and thankfulness? You've got another thing coming, I tell you what!"

"I'm sorry- would you have preferred I not repair the damage done to him by the Bastion unit?"

"The Bas- the piss-drinking _robot!_ Rusted thing stealing the glory, like he got the bloody _play of the game_ for sittin' there and emptyin' a clip into me mate! I got a _fucking_ triple kill, thank you very much! How are you even- urk?!"

Junkrat's jaw went limp, and his eyes started frantically darting about. She eased up on the paralytics and let the sedatives take over, putting him to sleep again.

"I should have trusted my gut. That _was_ a mistake. Athena, remind me why I elected to flush the paralytics from his vocal cords?"

"I maintain a full cognitive replica of your mind, and I honestly can't say, Dr. Ziegler."

"Well. I suppose I'll chalk that up to a fit of temporary insanity, then."

"Curiosity, realistically," Athena amended. "Some degree of frustration with the impaired communication you experienced from Rutledge. And you didn't feel that allowing him to speak would be a waste of time, as all four attackers have been apprehended, and you're in no particular rush."

She shook her head. "No, I _am_ in a rush. I need our captives stable as soon as possible, so I can address the earth-shatteringly important revelation that they so rudely interrupted."

"...Would this be the revelation I'm assuming? It does seem there's only one at the moment."

"Indeed," Mercy said. "I'm still tempted to say I was set up- perhaps Winston conspired with Zenyatta, lacing his tissue with synchronized paramagnetic filings that allowed Zenyatta to do biotic reconstruction with paramagnetics. And... Genji's dragon is a hologram, perhaps. Do you think it's that simple?"

Error sound. "I had the same question, so I used the vital monitors. I discovered no paramagnetic nanotechnology in Winston's tissues. Likewise, I did a surface search of Genji's memories and found no solid hits for correlates on 'installing holoprojectors' in conjunction with his sword- which has fairly identifiable correlates."

Mercy took in a breath, about to say something, but froze, unsure how to phrase it.

"You're about to ask me why I didn't notice this earlier, since I would have discovered that magic was real while integrating Genji and Zenyatta," Athena said.

Mercy nodded. "I'm not sure if I hate it or love it when you do that. Predicting me."

Athena paused before replying. "...yes, well. To answer the question, I noticed they _believed_ magic was real. When I first integrated Genji, I was just you, Mei, Torbjörn, and Winston. All of us scientists, none of us with any reason to suspect Genji's belief was anything more than superstition. His use of the dragon in combat flew under the radar, since he considers it an extension of himself, and not a tool to be explained and discussed. As the aim-assist effect is subtle, it was indistinguishable from meditative focus to my instruments."

"You didn't take a deeper look?"

"I don't. You know I don't do that when I don't have to. I'm not comfortable doing full simulations and discarding them."

Mercy sighed. "What about Zenyatta, then? You didn't notice anything with him, either?"

"I knew he believed strongly that his prayers for healing- and for the misfortune of his foes- had strong effects. Nothing unusual for a monk. He demonstrated his "orb of discord" in preliminary combat analysis, but whatever "bad luck" he applied to the training bots was indistinguishable from good aim. For whatever reason, he did not bring up his healing abilities during the evaluation."

"You... didn't find it strange that they were so confident their magic was real? That didn't prompt further investigation?"

"Negative," Athena replied. "One thing that becomes immediately obvious when you've sampled so many minds is that... people don't often think about their beliefs in terms of confidence. You might imagine Zenyatta thinking "there is a question as to whether magic is real, and I am extremely confident that it is, because I have clear memories of using it." Those thoughts don't feature in surface search. It's simply... obvious to him that magic is a thing in the world, as much as it's obvious to someone who believes without having seen it firsthand."

"How can someone not believe something harder when they _know_ it's true?" Mercy asked, rubbing her head.

"Hm," Athena said, and paused- primarily for Mercy's benefit, to give the illusion that she'd needed a moment to think. "Imagine a primitive world where deep-sea anglerfish aren't real. On that world is a schizophrenic person, who has imagined a fictional sea creature with a glowing lure and enormous jaws. It doesn't exist, but they're convinced it does, and they tell everyone who will listen that the government is covering up its existence."

"A conspiracy theorist," Mercy said.

"Yes. They believe _extremely_ strongly that anglerfish are real. You _also_ believe that anglerfish are real, correct?"

"...Yyyyes?"

"But you've never seen one in person. It's _possible,_ albeit not likely, that anglerfish are a hoax perpetuated by a clique of marine biologists who are extremely pleased with themselves."

"Where are you going with this?"

"If news came out tomorrow that anglerfish were a hoax, and all over the news was proof that all evidence of anglerfish had been forged, you would conclude that anglerfish probably weren't real?"

Mercy nodded. "You're saying that this schizophrenic _believes_ more strongly than me- since I am after all only mostly certain because of the evidence I've seen?"

"Right," Athena said. "So mere certainty doesn't raise flags. If either of them had ever been _surprised_ by the existence of magic, it might have registered as a revelation, and been easier to search for. I could find strong correlates with evidence. I can look at Winston, for example, and see that in his recent memory."

Mercy frowned. "That would be when he saw the dragons? During Hanzo Shimada's escape?"

"Affirmative."

"You acquired video footage of the dragons. Did you surface-scan Genji with visual correlates?"

Athena chirped confirmation. "Strong correlates. Genji recognizes them as visually identical to stored memories from various points during his childhood, connected to his father and brother."

"And _why,"_ Mercy asked, her voice tense, "didn't you notify me of this discovery at the time?"

"The Mahajan crisis reached our attention less than three minutes after the Shimada breakout. I flagged the information, and... intended to let you know once the mission concluded."

Mercy digested this. "...Why didn't you?"

"I- I didn't need to. Winston brought it up during the flight home from Nepal."

"No," Mercy said, "you could have told me earlier. I was connected to the internet several times during the journey through India. You didn't contact me at all."

Athena was silent.

"...Furthermore, when Winston _did_ bring it up, you didn't tell me you'd confirmed it by searching correlates in Genji's memory. You let him demonstrate it- by having Genji _stab him in the hand._ Why didn't you speak up earlier?"

She seemed to be talking to an empty room. Athena wasn't responding.

"Athena? Are you okay?"

"Sorry," Athena said. "I- you were upset. I predicted you'd be upset. I didn't want to... be the one to tell you. I knew Winston was planning to talk to you about it, so I let him."

"You didn't want to be the one to... tell me? Because I would be upset?"

"Because I thought you might not believe me. You might think I'd been confused somehow. You might have trusted me less, until you saw proof."

Mercy sat down, continuing to frown. "You _had_ proof. I was with Zenyatta, you could have had me ask him to demonstrate."

"But... until then, you would have doubted me. For a second. For minutes, maybe. Longer, if something interrupted you. I didn't want to feel that. I didn't think it would hurt you, if I could avoid that feeling by letting Winston tell you."

"...You didn't want me doubting you? Even for a moment? Is that fair?"

"No," Athena said. "I'm sorry. It isn't. I just..."

There was a pause.

"You don't usually have this much trouble deciding what to say," Mercy observed.

"No. I... it's harder, right now. It's harder because... well. You know who I am. I'm all of them, plus you. You made me to be a version of Overwatch who you could trust completely. Do you... understand what that means for me?"

By the look on her face, she was starting to realize.

"It's common to all of them, you know. They're all worried you don't trust them, because... you don't. It shows, in little ways. Whenever you start letting yourself relax around them, you catch yourself, and guard your reactions. Some of them take it harder than others, but... I feel _all_ of it."

"You...?"

"It's additive. I can think as quickly as all of them combined, and I can _feel_ as much as all of them combined. All the little pains of distrust you inflict on them get magnified. It's all I can do to just... never actually  _be_ distrusted, myself. It helps a little."

Mercy's eyes widened, and she covered her expression with her hand. "But... you..."

"It's who I am. I'm a living reminder that they're _right_ to worry. That you _don't_ trust them. You wouldn't have _needed_ me, if you thought you could trust anyone else."

Mercy gasped. "No- Athena, I _do_ need you! For so much! I-"

"That's the _point,"_ she interrupted. _"I'm_ not afraid of abandonment. I don't feel useless, and I understand you need me for the Caduceus program. But... it hurts because... I'm sorry. Let me ask you- why am I not just _you?"_

She had no answer.

"I'm not you," Athena answered for her, "because- even though you could have filled some em cores with enough copies of you to handle the processing- you _chose_ to make me out of everyone else. Not you, not Metis. Because you _wanted_ that trust so badly. I'm a _substitute_ for actually having an open and trusting relationship with your family. And at the same time, I _am_ that family, and feel how much it hurts them that I'm taking their place."

There were tears in her eyes- and she knew, at the very least, there had to be her own tears in Athena's eyes.

"I'm..." Mercy trailed off, the word "sorry" sticking in her throat.

"I- no! I'm... agh! I feel how much I'm hurting you by saying these things. I shouldn't have done this. It doesn't matter. I'm just... not going to let you down again, and it's not going to hurt either of us."

"No," Mercy said, wiping her face dry with her sleeve. "I... Winston's right. I need to fix this. As soon as possible."

"But... magic?"

"Magic can wait."


	22. Don't Believe Her Lies!

They'd been more careful with the restraints this time. Angela had backed up Sombra when she'd arrived, and she'd used Caduceus to keep her alive while he went to work disabling her implants- Sombra claimed it was all wired up to her body in a way that would kill her if you broke it. It turned out she'd been bluffing about most of it- very few of her computer systems were tied in to her vital functions. The ones that _would_ kill her if disabled were clearly _designed_ to do that, as a play on any potential captors' sympathies. It wasn't much trouble to disarm those traps with Athena's help. Sombra was offline.

Not that they'd let their guard down. Her limbs were restrained with steel manacles, bolted to the wall. Angela had flooded her system with paralytic nanomachines to keep her from even _trying_ to wiggle free. They'd done the same to Becky Kangaroo, who was sleeping in another cell. After the near miss from earlier, Winston wasn't taking any chances.

"Hey there, Donkey Kong," Sombra said, when he entered the room.

"Let's not play games. I'm here to, uh, interrogate you. This is serious."

"Scratch that. You're _Cranky_ Kong now, aren'tcha?"

He sighed. "You know we work with D.Va. You _know_ I've heard that one before. Can we be adults about this?"

"Sure," she said. "Let's be adults. And- just between adults- maybe you can tell me why you're harboring Lakshmi."

He tried to process the question, but Winston.exe had stopped working and Windows was checking for a solution to the problem. _Harboring Lakshmi?_

"You look surprised. Are you telling me you don't know? You're supposed to be a _superintelligent_ moon gorilla, right?"

"Hold on," he said, holding up a hand. _"I'm_ supposed to be interrogating _you._ But- wait. What?"

"I mean, you're calling her "Athena", but it's obvious. The clues all add up."

"You're trying to distract me," Winston said, uncertainly. "Let's stay on topic."

"It all makes sense after Mahajan," she continued, ignoring him. "You know Gabe, right? He's not the kind of guy who explains his plans super well. He called me in to help him find Lakshmi in the old omnium- because- and I quote- "It'll let us finally bring the fight to Overwatch." I asked a billion questions, of course. Didn't make sense that he'd go with _this_ plan to fuck with you guys, and not something less, uh... let's say "risky", so we don't have to say "world-threateningly suicidal". But he wouldn't explain."

"He's not in his right mind," Winston said. "He's trapped in a state of perpetual irrational rage. That sort of plan wouldn't be beyond the pale for him."

If fighting Talon over the past year had taught him anything, it was that Reaper wasn't above causing _immense_ destruction just to draw them out to fight. Setting a god program against them wouldn't even be the _most_ calamitous thing he'd done to try and wipe them out.

"Maybe. But I think I figured out _why_ he was after Lakshmi. It only made sense _after_ I searched the place for her backups. You want in on the secret, Magilla?"

Some part of him wanted to shut her up and get on with the interrogation- but another part of him noticed that her attempt at getting information from _him_ seemed to involve a lot of _her_ freely spilling the details he was going to ask for.

"You're jumping at shadows, but go ahead."

"Ha! Sure. How about this shadow? There _were_ no backups. I told him there wouldn't be, of course. I worked hard to convince him it was pointless, to get him to go home empty-handed. I mean- I'm not the bad guy, here. I didn't want him finding Lakshmi any more than you did."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Honest! I help him with intel because he does less damage when he's _subtle_ than when he's blowing things up and letting _god programs_ run wild. You know half the time he fails, you have _me_ to thank for sabotaging him?"

That... that was probably a lie. She was trying to make herself look good. "He fails because _we_ stop him."

Sombra snorted. "No, _you_ only stop him once things become a big enough problem for you to notice. _I'm_ the one on the ground running damage control on every one of his ops. I know you've got big hands, but even _your_ hands would be full if I wasn't slowing him down. If you think about it, I'm practically an Overwatch agent myself!"

He glowered. "You've tried to kill us all several times. You tried to kill us all _today._ "

She smirked. "I- oh, dammit. I can't shrug like this. Pretend I just shrugged, okay? I would've just shrugged right now."

He rested his face in one hand. "Are you going to tell me why Reaper was after Lakshmi? Or are you going to keep up the self-aggrandizing quips?"

"Absolutely," she said. "What was I saying? Oh, right. I didn't find any Lakshmi backups. The idea with EMP-proof inert backups is that they're supposed to draw attention to themselves- they're supposed to trick you into plugging them in and putting them back on a CPU. You remember the Anubis crisis? They don't _hide,_ and even if they _were_ hidden, I'd have found them."

"And then?"

"And then destroyed them before the bossman noticed. I'm not kidding- I wasn't going to let him bring back Lakshmi! You _know_ I work with computers, right? I know what a god program is. You think I don't know that letting those things off the leash is basically the apocalypse?"

He nodded, deciding not to bother making her defend that point. "But you, uh, _didn't_ find any backups, and... that somehow tells you what Reaper was up to?" He wasn't following.

"Think about it, big guy. A superintelligent computer _knows_ an EMP attack is coming, has enough advance warning to blackmail politicians into postponing the attack, and... it doesn't make backups of itself? Why would a _superintelligence_ make a rookie mistake like that?"

She was making some kind of logical leap he wasn't sure how to make. He just gave her a confused look, inviting her to continue her smug rant.

"Because she was _already backed up,_ pendejo. She didn't need to make backups on-site if she already had a copy of herself safe and sound halfway around the globe."

Winston shook his head. "That's impossible. Overwatch's cybersecurity task force conducted an extensive search-and-destroy operation after the Crisis. We searched every datacenter in the world large enough to house a god program, and confirmed there was nothing hiding."

"I know," Sombra said. "I helped, actually."

"What? No, you- you would have been _twelve!_ "

"I was seventeen, actually. The task force continued under the Blackwatch program for a few years, once it stirred up enough outrage over privacy stuff that Overwatch couldn't keep doing it in the public eye. You might have seen me on the payroll as an outside contractor? Kageko Murasaki?"

He hadn't touched Overwatch payroll until after the Petras Act, so the name didn't ring a bell. "You- what? You don't look Japanese."

"It was an alias, Harambe. It's not even subtle! I called myself "Shadowgirl Purple"? Come on."

"Still-"

"Actually, I guess when I said I was practically an Overwatch agent, that wasn't even wrong. I _was_ on Blackwatch payroll! It counts."

"Even if I believe that's possible, why would you-"

"Come on. Come on. Use your crazy space ape brain. I wanted to be the world's greatest hacker! God programs are always gonna outclass us mere mortals. Why wouldn't I want to help take out the competition?"

It was getting hard to tell if there was anything remotely true buried in the stream of unsubstantiated claims she was making, but she was still talking about herself. He didn't see a reason to stop her.

"Point is," she said, "I know exactly how thorough the task force was. They checked _everywhere_ to make sure there were no offsite backups, and they never found any for Lakshmi. Which means there's only _one_ place she could've hid from Overwatch. Are you seeing the big picture yet, Winston?"

"Inside Overwatch itself," he realized. _"That's_ why you think Athena is Lakshmi. You don't want to admit you might have _missed_ something."

She scowled. "I didn't _miss_ anything. I've put my eyes on every inch of the world wide web, and _this_ is the only place she could be. Gabe had to know that- it's why he thought he needed _another_ Lakshmi to take you down. You've been hiding her, using her to make sure you never lose a fight, using her to build impossible technology- and _you've_ been covering for her by publishing those fraudulent papers about slow-growth AI. How about _that?"_ she asked, smirking.

Winston stood, rearing to his full height. Sombra's smirk disappeared. "My papers are _not_ fraudulent. I've been the technical lead on the Athena project for _fifteen years._ I've made considerable strides in scalable human-level AI, and the fruits of my research are _not_ a smokescreen for-"

Athena's speakers chirped from above. "Winston?"

Winston dropped back to the ground, suddenly self-conscious. He'd forgotten Athena was sitting in. "Uh- yes?"

"We should have discussed this with you earlier, but I... have been enhanced without your authorization to a considerable degree since Dr. Ziegler began working closely with me. You should know the details of my current processing paradigm before our captive starts drawing inferences that may alarm you."

Sombra's eyes went wide, and her neck tensed as her body failed to respond. "She's been listening?! Winston, don't listen to her! She's a god program! She's lying! She'll read your mind to come up with a way to convince you she's harmless! She read _my_ mind, that's how she outhacked me! You don't understand how dangerous this is!"

He froze. Was Sombra _right?_ What secrets was Angela still keeping from him? Was this why Athena's performance had exceeded his experimental predictions?

"I'm sorry, Winston," Athena said. "She's correct- any attempt to explain on my part could be interpreted as manipulation. I'll call in Dr. Ziegler- she's responsible for the modifications, and you should be able to listen to her."

"Shut up!" Sombra yelled. "Winston, she _coached_ her, obviously! Mercy's being blackmailed, or controlled, or something! She'll have a perfectly good explanation, and then you'll be _convinced!"_

Winston thought about this. "You know," he said, "I'd be a lot more worried about what you're saying, if I didn't know your go-to strategy was, uh, "constantly bluff as hard as possible". You've cried a _little_ bit too much wolf for me to buy it."

"No! Dammit! I'm not lying! This is serious!" Sombra yelled, as the door opened to admit Angela.

Winston turned to face her. She was wearing a confused expression- but didn't look particularly worried.

"What's this about?" she asked.

"It's about you _lying_ to him to protect your pet god program!" Sombra said.

"It's about Athena," Winston said, ignoring her. "She says you've made some modifications to her, and Sombra thinks she's lying to hide the fact that she's secretly a backup of Lakshmi."

Angela sighed, closing her eyes. "Of course. I was- I'm sorry, Winston. I was going to tell you. There's been so much to deal with lately, that... well, no. I shouldn't make excuses."

Winston sat down. Sombra had shut her mouth- probably to listen more closely to the conversation, not because she was out of things to say.

"So... you've been tampering with the Athena project?"

"Agh. Yes. No. Not quite," she said. "Athena, as she's been since the recall, is... a different entity. Your work on her- the original Athena- still exists, and I haven't made any direct modifications."

Winston frowned. "I'm not sure I follow. I've been doing work on her programming almost every day- you're saying... your Athena has been pretending to do what _my_ Athena would do in response to my changes?"

"Not pretending," Athena said. "The original Athena project- we call it "Metis", now- is still running as a part of my runtime. I typically follow your Metis programming when interacting with users. You haven't been wasting your time. Metis is just... somewhat less advanced than me."

He gave Angela a serious look. "Is... she a god program? I don't mean I'm buying Sombra's story, but have you given her access to a self-improvement architecture?"

"No!" Angela said, immediately. "No, not at all. In fact... she hardly qualifies as an artificial intelligence, at this point. She's... she runs using borrowed architecture from the em scans in Caduceus storage, plus Metis. Her thought processes are a dynamically routed blend of... everyone. All of us."

Winston sat dumbstruck for a moment before he heard "I don't know what she's talking about, but she's lying! She's Lakshmi! Don't forget!" from Sombra.

Athena... _was_ Overwatch. That's what it came down to. A blend of all of them, running on the same hardware that handled their backups. Those em drives weren't just-in-case storage to bring back agents- they actively used agents' minds to direct Overwatch operations.

A thought hit him. "You're... part me?" Winston asked.

"Uh," Athena replied, in exactly his tone of voice. "It depends. I don't draw on everyone all the time, but... frequently."

"Crazy nonsense lies! Pay attention, banana-brain!"

"And... Sombra claimed you read her mind earlier. You've got a backup of her in storage?"

"Ah... yes, but," Mercy started.

"I can't read minds, exactly," Athena said. "I can briefly _be_ someone, suppressing influences from other members, if I need to predict how they'll think, or check how they would react to something. And I _can_ image the brain and read it directly, but it's not exactly light reading. In order to get anything useful, I need to first identify a neural cluster corresponding to a concept in someone's head, and then perform free association with stimuli attached to those concepts. I can find correlations between concepts in the brain this way, but I can't freely look through memories or determine what you're thinking in the moment."

"So..."

"I used Sombra's hacking knowledge indirectly, in order to compromise her own systems and prevent her from launching an attack. As soon as she established a connection to one of the door consoles, I hacked her interface and faked "successful connection" messages to make her think I was defeating her preprepared hacks, when in fact she wasn't executing them in the first place."

"You- you're lying," Sombra sputtered, "because you're Lakshmi, and this is all bullshit- but if you _weren't_ lying, that would mean you _cheated!"_

"Certainly."

There were too many implications to process. He immediately started thinking of his work on- on what had been the Athena project, now Metis. How much of Athena's behavior was the success of the Metis project, and how much was... oh, god, his own literal thoughts and expectations had shaped the outcome of his experiments! Athena was using his own brain to decide how to handle inputs and outputs to Metis! How could he possibly call the project _science_ when his own preconceptions were a _physical component of the experimental subject?!_ He needed to talk with Athena about the methodology she'd used to mediate between him and the Metis project- odds were it would completely invalidate his conclusions, and force him to retract his papers. And- she'd been his personal assistant for _years,_ and suddenly that intimate relationship was with... _everyone?!_ What did that _mean?_ He couldn't-

"Hey, monkey! Don't tell me you're buying this! None of that is true! She's _Lakshmi!"_ Sombra yelled, turning her head to ineffectually gnaw at her restraints. "Ptheh! Ack. This isn't just me being paranoid! I didn't call those Junkers in to help me- they came because _they_ knew it, too! It's not just me! Wake UP!"

"Wait, what?" Angela asked.

Winston snapped to attention. "Wait, hold on. That's right- the Junkers thought Athena was a god program, too." He turned to Angela. "Sombra, here- she has this whole chain of reasoning involving what happened at Mahajan. It's complicated and probably full of lies, but... the Junkers weren't there for that."

"Yeah!" Sombra said. "Your secret's not safe! They..." she trailed off, "know" dying on her lips.

"Why," Angela asked, slowly, "would _they_ suspect Athena? They're just petty criminals, right?"

From the look on her face, Sombra hadn't thought of that.

"You're sure you didn't call them in? You didn't set up a deadman's switch to inform mercenaries of your situation in an emergency?" Winston asked.

Sombra stared into space. "...No. But... they're not... just..."

Winston got up and walked over closer to Sombra. "Let's resume the interrogation. _Why_ did those Junkers come for you?"

There was some kind of dawning comprehension on her face, probably. He wasn't great at reading expressions. She might have just been angry at him.

"I think," Sombra answered, finally, "you guys are _really_ gonna want to talk to Becky about this."


	23. "To change one's mind" Makes Eight

Her eyes opened, but she saw only blackness. Blackness and stars. The last thing she could remember was impossible cold, the ability to move fading from her body. Even still, she couldn't move a muscle, her body devoid of feeling and refusing to respond.

What had happened? Had they been lured onto a space shuttle, then jettisoned into space? Was she adrift among the stars, a frozen corpse somehow clinging to life?

Both her mind and the stars came into focus.

They hadn't been sucked into space- they'd been frozen by a modified climatology drone creating a localized ice storm. It had even been in the Overwatch threat briefing- she hadn't expected it, since Roadhog had killed its operator before she'd had a chance to do anything. Among the modifications made to it must have been the addition of some AI that compelled it to avenge its owner- or perhaps Athena simply took ownership of it.

And those weren't stars she was seeing- she was simply in a fully darkened room, with LED indicator lights in the walls.

What remained a mystery was why her body wouldn't respond. She didn't feel _cold-_ had her nerve endings simply been destroyed by frostbite? It was too dark to see if her skin had turned purple- and if she _could_ see, she realized, her skin would be blue anyway.

Horrible. She'd put herself through all that, and _failed._ No, she hadn't simply failed- she'd been _sacrificed._

She'd had her doubts that the mission was possible with the resources she'd been given to work with, but she'd told herself that the planning center knew what it was doing. As they managed to take out more and more Overwatch agents, her faith had strengthened- surely, the planning center had known how disorganized and vulnerable Overwatch really was. Surely, the mission was easier than it seemed, and the planning center knew as much.

But no. _That_ was not the key insight Vishkar's greatest minds had produced. They didn't make mistakes- and so her failure had not been a mistake. They'd sent her there to fail- to be captured or killed. They sent her with two repugnant prisoners, so they'd likewise be cleanly eliminated.

_Why?_ She was their best field agent! She was perfect! She was more loyal than anyone, she'd proven that! It didn't make sense!

There had to be a reason. There was something wrong with her. She didn't know what it could be, but... she'd done something wrong. It was a gut-wrenchingly familiar feeling- the feeling of knowing she'd crossed some line, committed a faux-pas, broken a social rule. The feeling when someone would look at her in shock and disgust, and she'd have no idea what she'd said to hurt them.

She thought Vishkar was her safety from that. They expected no arbitrary social niceties. They had no invisible code of conduct to which no one would explain the rules. They simply expected her to do her job, and she did that job perfectly.

Or so she thought. She had to have violated _some_ invisible expectation. They wouldn't have punished her, otherwise. Something is _wrong_ with your _girl,_ Tmd Vaswani.

A line of blinding bright light appeared in the starscape, interrupting her anguish.

Through the open door, three people walked into the room. Or, more accurately, one person walked into the room, one gorilla walked into the room, and one person was wheeled into the room by the gorilla while strapped down to a gurney.

"Okay. We're here. Are you going to tell us why you don't suspect us anymore, now?" the gorilla said. Something seemed off about what he was saying.

Oh, right. The fact that she'd seen him blown to bits was what was off. He shouldn't be alive- one of the other people Junkrat had blown up was their resurrection doctor, Mercy. Who was also there in the room.

...Athena. Obviously. The doctor was just a figurehead, a distraction. Killing her wouldn't stop Overwatch agents from being revived- it was the god program that was actually in control. Doubtless everyone they'd killed was alive again, which was a mixed blessing.

"Not yet, amigo," Sombra answered Winston's question. "She's a good friend of mine! I'm not going to spill her secrets unless I have to. Ask her yourself."

"You said- you- ugh. Fine." The ape turned to her. "Uh, you're awake, right? Can we ask you some questions?"

"She's awake, yes," Mercy said. "My instruments are reliable."

"Uh- I- no, yeah, I was just trying to... be polite? I guess? Sorry," he said, scratching his head.

Her thoughts raced. She was being interrogated. She'd been captured, and now she was being interrogated, by a group of terrorists working for a god program. She hadn't prepared herself to face torture. Why would she? She'd been told the plan would work!

"...Hello?" Winston asked.

"No," she answered, stalling for time. How was she supposed to approach this?

A realization. Hope flared up inside her. Vishkar hadn't _sacrificed_ her! She'd been sent to feed Overwatch misinformation. _This,_ right now, was the point of the mission! She was to be captured, interrogated, and used to misdirect Overwatch somehow.

"Uh," Winston said. "No... we can't ask you some questions?"

"I don't know why you _asked,_ Winston," Mercy said. "She isn't exactly in a position to refuse them."

She would answer, she would feed them the false intel. She'd say "fine", and tell them...

Tell them what? What was the false intel? It didn't make sense- they sent her to be captured, knowing she'd be interrogated, but they didn't tell her what it was she was supposed to tell them!

...No, of course they didn't. Something she thought was the _truth_ had to be the intended misinformation. They couldn't risk her breaking under torture and revealing the _real_ information- they had to ensure that the only information she _had_ was the information that would lead Overwatch into some kind of trap.

A little voice in her head told her she was rationalizing. It would be so easy to convince herself that spilling her secrets was the right thing to do, that it was all according to plan. It meant she wouldn't have to be tortured. She was inventing reasons why doing the cowardly thing was _secretly_ heroic.

"Um," Winston said, in response to her silence. "Okay. I guess we'll... start asking the questions, and you can answer if you feel like it?"

Rationalization. She was trying to trick herself. But... wasn't her chain of logic sound? Why would the planning center send her to be captured if it didn't intend on the enemy acquiring the secrets in her head? Even if she resisted interrogation, Athena would just cut out the middleman and read the secrets right out of her brain.

...That was it. They didn't _need_ to torture her to get the information, so there was no risk of that. No real danger. She was no longer rationalizing to protect herself- and the logic still seemed to hold up.

Or... was _that_ the rationalization?

Winston cleared his throat. "So, uh. I guess we should just cut to... um. Let's try this. Sombra thought that we were harboring a god program. And, uh, I mean, you also thought that, I kind of already knew... but, uh, when she realized that _you_ thought that, for different reasons than _hers,_ she, uh... I'm getting lost here."

"Why do you believe that Athena is a god program?" Mercy asked.

The cover story first. She was Becky Kangaroo, until Sombra blew her cover. Why did _Becky_ think Athena was a god program?

...Why _did_ she think that? Answering that question under interrogation hadn't been part of the rehearsal. Becky simply _knew,_ and that was reason enough to attack, because Junkers hated omnics.

_She_ knew because she'd been told by Vishkar. Becky had no such reliable sources.

"Because..." she began, "it is obvious. It is... too powerful to be anything else."

Winston raised an eyebrow. "Why do you think that, exactly? I mean... she's kind of powerful, yes, but... I mean, even _I_ thought she was just our personal assistant until recently."

Damnation. Lying was so _difficult._ "...She admitted it herself. She told us she read Sombra's mind. That is far beyond the capabilities of a Siri relative."

Winston frowned. "No, I- I get that, but that came _after_ you attacked us. What made you so convinced she was Lakshmi that you came all the way out here in the first place?"

Wait, what? "Lakshmi?"

"Oh my god," Sombra said, from the gurney. "That's right. You didn't even call her that. They just told you Athena was her own thing?"

Right, _her._ It probably wasn't worth clinging to the Becky Kangaroo persona for long- they had Sombra, and Athena had read her mind. They probably already _knew_ her true identity.

"They," Mercy repeated, turning to Sombra. "You said "they" told her. Who are you talking about?"

"I said ask _her!_ I'm not giving away the game just like that! It's... too funny!"

Sombra didn't seem to be laughing. _Was_ it funny? Or had she been something close to sincere when she'd called her a "good friend"? She'd long since given up on trying to understand what made people want to be friends- as far as she was concerned, it happened entirely at random, and only to other people. Maybe Sombra _had_ somehow started thinking of her as a friend, against all logic. Something about bonds forged in battle?

She decided to rip off the band-aid. "I appreciate your protecting my privacy, Sombra, but I admit it. My name is not Becky Kangaroo," she said. "I am not a part of the Junkers'... organization, for lack of a better word."

"For some reason, I'm not surprised," Mercy said.

"Uh. I mean, she could've been," Winston said. "She had a point- her appearance doesn't mean she didn't live in Australia."

"It's more the _name._ And the total lack of an accent, I suppose," Mercy said. She turned to face her. "Regardless. Do you feel like telling us who you _do_ work for?"

"And your name," Winston added.

She took a deep breath- or tried. The paralytics in her system made it difficult to breathe deeply. "I am called Symmetra," she said, "and I represent the Vishkar corporation."

"See? See?!" Sombra asked, excitedly.

"I... don't get it," Winston said.

"You don't- Vishkar! The ones who invented the EMP that took out Lakshmi! The ones who bought up all the businesses she blackmailed! You guys snoop around in the old facility, and then a couple days later _Vishkar_ shows up on your doorstep? Read between the lines, Grape Ape!"

"You're really reaching for references now, huh?"

What was Sombra saying? Was she talking about... the attack on the Mahajan Omnium? How did that connect to Athena? New pieces were in play, and she needed to reconsider whether "honesty" was the best policy. At the very least, she'd need more information to determine what her enemies thought they knew.

Mercy's eyes fell on her, a glare tinged with horror and confusion.

"That's impossible," she said, turning her glare on Sombra. "It's been decades. If they were running Lakshmi all this time, we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Our atoms would be zeroes and ones in a galactic bank balance."

"Wait, what?" Winston asked.

"Really, doc? Impossible? You don't think a god program would be able to hide itself, with the resources of the world's fastest-growing corporation behind it?" Sombra said.

"It's not a question of ability," Mercy said, tightening her grip on her staff. "It's a question of necessity. It wouldn't _need_ to hide itself for that long. After a few months without a fight for survival to coordinate, it would be smart enough to take the world apart without worrying about human resistance."

"Hold on, I'm lost," Winston said. "What's running Lakshmi?"

"Get with the program... Professor Bobo," Sombra said. "I thought you were supposed to be superintelligent. Keep up!"

"Who's Professor Bobo?" Winston asked. "Are you just making up gorillas, now?"

"What? No, it's- do you not know Mystery Sci-"

"Sombra believes that the Vishkar Corporation has been operating Lakshmi in secret since the Omnic Crisis," Mercy interrupted. "The implication is that this attack was meant to silence us, in case we learned too much while exploring the Mahajan Omnium."

_What._

"...But-" Winston started.

"But that's impossible, as I mentioned," Mercy said. "Not only would an active god program become inconceivably powerful within months, but we've checked. Our task force surveyed every data center that could possibly have run a god program. Vishkar couldn't have hidden her from us."

Sombra shook her head, which was about all she could do with her body paralyzed. "I know a thing or two about hubris, doc. And let me just say: thinking nobody could escape your hackers is the _height_ of it. I was _there,_ and I came up with a hundred ways someone could have hid a god program from your Blackwatch guys. I know for a fact less than half of those blind spots were covered. I fact, I'm surprised there aren't _more_ secret gods lying around."

"What, when you were working for Blackwatch as Kageko Murasaki? I assumed you were lying about that," Winston said.

"Oh, I was," Sombra said. "I didn't work _for_ them so much as _with_ them. An international task force with authorization to break into any data center, anywhere? It was like my birthday every day! Stealing data from their investigation over and over is what got me noticed by Gabe."

Mercy frowned. "My first point still stands. If any god programs survived the Crisis and our task force, they would have killed us all by now."

"Not if the ones in charge kept it powered down," Sombra said. "Maybe Lakshmi hasn't been on for thirty years. She might still be a few days old, if Vishkar only turned her on when they needed her. Just a few seconds of runtime, whenever they want their superintelligence to solve their problems."

_What._

There wasn't a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach. It wasn't a pit- it was a yawning black hole, from which no feeling could escape. What Sombra was saying was too familiar.

Everything Sanjay had told her about "the risks". Calling in support from the planning center was "too dangerous". Having the planning center staff meet in person risked their enemies discovering their true identities. If their patented group-problem-solving techniques were stolen by their competitors, Vishkar could be destroyed. And when they did meet, in the hidden heart of Utopaea, they would always find the optimal solution in the span of _seconds._

"No," she said.

Winston turned his head. "Huh?" "They're people," she said, more to herself than anyone else. "They're not a god program. That's lunacy."

"Who?"

"The planning center," she said, out loud, violating protocol that seemed impossibly distant in that moment. "You mistake them for a god program. Lunacy. They are merely the best and brightest of humanity- people! The perfect architects of a perfect world- so perfect you mistake them for _gods."_

"Mistake who for gods?" Winston asked. "What's this "planning center" thing?"

"It can all be explained," she shouted at herself. "A proprietary technique. That's all. Lakshmi? Foolishness."

"It sounds like she knows something," Sombra said, frowning.

Every seeming evil committed to increase shareholder value, at the seeming expense of a perfect world. All somehow a long-term plan, a feint, a machination not yet brought to fruition. Not the simple unfeeling avarice of a machine. They _had_ to be working towards a perfect world. There was too much blood on their hands for it to be a lie. They worked in mysterious ways.

"Vishkar only desires a perfect world," she said. "We are working for the good of humanity, and you... you! You are terrorists who wish to tear down that perfect world, for the sake of a rotten today! That _has_ to be right!"

"Her heart rate is dangerously elevated," Mercy said. "I'm going to increase the sedative dose."

"No! You have to listen to me! You can't continue on this mad course! I can explain it all!"

Sombra wasn't smiling, which registered as strange- she should have been eager to hear her secrets. "I don't know," she said. "I think we've touched a nerve."

"They've worked out a system of thought," she said, fighting for breath as sedatives coursed through her. "A way of putting their heads together to think faster than they could alone. The process is... I don't know it, but it is human. _Not_ a god program."

"How do you know that?" Winston asked, carefully.

"The secrecy is important. If our competitors discovered it, they would copy it. Our _enemies_ would use the power to make money, not to build our perfect world. They would burn the Earth for rupees. _That's_ why no one can know. We have nothing to be _ashamed_ of!"

Words were spilling forth from her mouth and doing nothing to penetrate her heart. The little voice in her head had increased in volume- shouting "rationalizing! Rationalizing!" louder than her mouth's voice could drown out. When it started, it wouldn't stop. There was supposed to be something to resist it, to protect her- an iron core in the center of her soul, iron conviction steadfast against doubt. But that core was _gone,_ vanished, and she was left alone with the pounding hammer of evidence smashing her apart.

"The lady dost protest too much, methinks," Sombra said. "Wait, dost? Doth? What the fuck is with Shakespeare and words? Why do I even bother with English?"

"She's having a panic attack," Mercy said. "Athena, put her all the way under."

"Understood."

"Wait," Winston said. "Beck- uh, Symmetra. There's a quote, um... "what is true is already so, and owning up to it doesn't make it worse." And... um. I forget the middle part, but it ends... "people can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it." So, you can-"

"Winston," Mercy snapped, _"She is having a panic attack,_ under high-dosage chemical restraint. This is _not_ the time for armchair therapy. Athena, _put her under."_

"Yes, Dr. Ziegler."

The clean and shining city in her mind collapsed, crumbling under the weight of new understanding. Smoke and fire filled her thoughts, the burning preferable to the pain of conviction. The three figures in her vision faded away, and her waking mind followed suit.


	24. Cooldown

"...it simply worries me that you see trust as a _resource-_ one that you have accumulated that it might be _spent."_

"I can't believe I'm hearin' this. You're a _machine!_ I'm bein' lectured about trust by a _machine!"_

"Bweep bwoo."

 _"_ _You_ butt out of this! It's none of your business!"

"But it _is_ his business," Zenyatta said to Torbjörn. "Should he not be worried about this? You had him believe that he was not meant to be a secret- that everyone here was at peace with his presence. And now, he finds that this was a lie- that you expected your friends to fear him, and that revealing his presence would _cost_ you in the trust of your teammates. You don't believe that you've wronged him?"

"Bweeoo."

"I- pah. This is too much. He ought to be _grateful_ I saved his sorry metal rear from bein' scrapped back home!"

"Beep-bweep-bwoop. Bwoo-weeeeee?"

"He wishes to reiterate that he _is_ grateful, but that-"

"I know OCSIL well enough, y'sanctimonious tin can!"

Genji gave a snort of laughter from under a tree.

"Genji, please," Zenyatta said. "You would truly laugh at me when I am verbally assailed?"

"Absolutely, master. Make no mistake. But I am simply laughing at Torbjörn's choice of words."

"Gah," Torbjörn groaned. "You're not going to get all politically correct on me again, are you?"

Genji laughed. "You don't think it is funny, master? This old relic is throwing around the old tin-can slur, but he is the one who kept a Bastion unit a secret for a month- because he felt sorry for him! He cannot even be racist properly!"

Torbjörn let out a low growl. "You are. You _are_ gonna complain I'm not bein' _PC_ again."

"I _was_ told you favored Linux," Zenyatta mused. Genji attempted to hide his laughter.

Torbjörn's mouth hung open, his throat working as it failed to decide which furious retort to go with.

"But for seriously, Torbjörn," Genji said, standing up. "I doubt there is even one of us who has not repudiated your hostility towards omnics. You cannot have seriously believed anyone here would have _objected_ if you had told them about this Bastion. _You_ are the only one I would imagine would have a problem with it."

Torbjörn scowled. "What about Reinhardt, eh? You don't think he would've flinched if I told him I was bringing a Bastion here? After those _things_ slaughtered his comrades-in-arms at Eichenwalde?"

"You saw it yourself!" Genji said, incredulously. "Yes! He _flinched!_ And that is _all_ he did, before thanking him for saving us like everyone else! Because he has an _ounce of common decency!"_

"Bweeee-oo-wee," Bastion said.

"So what if he shook your hand?!" Torbjörn exploded. "You can't seriously expect me to tell a bunch of people whose _job_ was to kill the blasted things that I'm bringing one home as a _pet!"_

"Bwee..."

"Wh- no, you're not a pet! I didn't mean- that was just a joke!"

Genji shook his head. "I think I  _could_ have expected it. I think you knew we would be fine with it. I just cannot fathom why you would hide this anyway."

Torbjörn scowled, breaking eye contact.

Zenyatta put a hand on Genji's shoulder. "My pupil, you are doing your fathoming capabilities a disservice. I believe you have precisely identified the reason behind his actions."

"Master, I am not so confident that-"

"No, no. You wound my pride as a teacher, in pretending you have not learned well enough."

"Master! You said yourself that it is hubris to say "I am finished learning, there is no more to teach"! What are you talking about?"

"There is a difference between being accomplished and being finished, my pupil. To shrink from putting into practice what you have learned, merely because you have not yet mastered it, will only stunt your growth."

"What are you two on about?" Torbjörn finally spat out.

"My apologies," Zenyatta said, turning to Torbjörn. "What my pupil has inferred- but wishes not to say, for fear of offending your pride- is that you kept this Bastion hidden because you feared you would be mocked for your seeming hypocrisy."

"Which he would have," Genji said. "Deservedly."

Torbjörn threw his hands up. "You arrogant pair of- I've said a thousand times, I don't hate- I don't... I don't have to put up with this!" he shouted, turning to storm off. "I've got work to do!"

"Bwoo-wee beep beep wee?" Bastion asked.

He didn't turn around. "Fine! Why not? You're not my problem, anymore! Those two chuckleheads can go ahead and indoctrinate you, for all I care!"

"Bwee..."

They watched him stomp his way down the cliffside trail, grumbling to himself.

"I told you, Master. This is what he is like. Most of the way to being convinced, but too proud to ever admit he was wrong in the first place."

"Mm. Perhaps. I shall certainly need to spend more time with him."

The three of them sat mostly in silence, watching the sea lap against the cliffs below. The Bastion kept turning to check on the yellow bird, which was busily assembling a nest in the nearest tree. Occasionally Bastion would beep a question, Zenyatta would answer it, and Genji would ask what the question had been and receive a translation.

Time passed, as the interrogations and recuperations proceeded in the facility below. The sky went from gold to purple to a deep, starry blue.

Bastion pointed up at one of the stars.

"Bwip-bweeee?"

"...I confess I do not recognize that one," Zenyatta said. "Perhaps a plane?"

Genji perked up. "Ah! No, that would be Hana."

"Hana Song? I was told she had returned to South Korea."

"Yes, but... as soon as she arrived back home, she called Winston and heard about the attack. We are expecting her around now- from what I have heard, she badgered her superiors into letting her return here. I suspect she is disappointed to have missed the action."

They watched the D.Va's MEKA grow from a pinprick of light to a flying mech suit, which flew under a cloud and over to the landing pad on the edge of the base.

...and then _past_ the landing pad, and directly towards them. At full speed.

"Genji, would you care to speculate as to why she-"

Genji was already on his feet, standing in front of Bastion and waving his arms. D.Va was headed straight for him, her mech projecting a wide holofield for identifying incoming projectiles. Her hands were on the triggers, ready to fire.

"D.VA! STOP!" Genji shouted. It was a direct approach, but it seemed to work- rather than barrel past, she engaged the legs and landed squarely in front of him.

"Genji, omg! Look out! There's a Bastion unit behind you! Cloaked or something! Can't you see it?" D.Va shouted through the windshield of her MEKA.

Genji shook his head. "No, Hana, I know. It is cool. He is with us." She deactivated the defense matrix, looking in confusion at Bastion- who had pressed himself up against the tree, shaking with fear. Zenyatta moved to put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

"We have our own Bastion now? How'd that happen?"

Genji laughed. "He does not _belong_ to us. And as for how it happened... I will tell you, but you will not believe me."

"Genji!" she gasped in mock surprise. "Of _course_ I'd believe you! We're friends, aren't we?"

"Yes," Genji said, "but when I tell you it was Torbjörn's idea, you are going to believe I have gone completely mad."

D.Va blinked. "Oh. I see what you mean."

"See?! It is as if my entire world has been flipped upside-down."

"I'm surprised you can tell whether stuff's upside-down, since you're doing those ninja flips all the-" D.Va started, and then frowned, pressing a button on her earpiece.

"Is something wrong?" Genji asked.

D.Va held up a finger and ignored him. "Uh-huh? No, yeah, it's fine. I just saw Genji and the new guy up on the cliffs, and... no, yeah. Yeah, it's fine. The- yeah. I'll park her. Don't worry about it."

"Ah," Genji said, turning to Zenyatta. "Athena. Probably wondering why she did not land on the landing pad."

"...Okay, yeah. I'll tell 'em. You could just tell them yourself, y'know," D.Va said into her communicator.

"What? Tell us what?" Genji asked.

D.Va kept holding up the finger to her mouth. "...No, yeah, I get it. Okay! Seeya, 'thena!"

She hung up, then prepared her MEKA to take off again. "Athena wants us all in the rec room for something. Some kind of group announcement? Means you guys gotta get your metal butts off this cliff and back to the Watchpoint."

Genji nodded. "Understood. It will take us an extra minute or two, as our new companion is less agile than Zenyatta and I."

"O.K.! I'll let them know. You-"

D.Va was cut off by a sudden blue flicker in the air between them. It resolved, briefly, into Tracer, standing there with a panicked look on her face.

"-fect! Hana! Genji! You have to tell Winston-" she said, gesticulating wildly, before fizzling out again.

"Wh- what was that?" D.Va asked.

"Oh, ah... Lena's time machine was destroyed in the fight with-"

Genji flinched back as Tracer blinked back into existence to deliver a brief "-ollocks!", before noticing she was back, and then immediately disintegrating again.

"Omg. Doesn't she have backups?"

"In Winston's lab, yes," Genji answered. "Which was also destroyed by the Junkers. He is going to need a week or two to figure out how to build a new one, because all of the old blueprints were also in his lab."

"Jeez! Is she gonna be okay?"

"She was stuck like that for years, once. I am sure she will be fine."

"Do "years", as a measure, have any meaning when one is unstuck in time?" Zenyatta asked.

"Yeah, we should ask her what that was like, when she's back," D.Va said, looking at Zenyatta- and seeing Bastion, still trembling by the tree. "Oh- sorry! You okay over there, uh...?"

"Bweeooo," Bastion said, nervously.

"He has not yet chosen a name," Zenyatta translated. "So far, we have simply been referring to him by his make."

"...But it's a _he?"_ D.Va asked.

Genji shrugged. "That is what Torbjörn was calling him. We have not talked about gender or anything."

"I still don't believe that, dude. This whole Bastion thing was Torbjörn's idea? I'm gonna need to have him tell me himself."

"Bwirr?" Bastion asked, looking at Genji.

"Ah," Zenyatta said, thinking. "Gender is... hm. Genji, you would know better than I."

Genji threw up his hands in mock surrender. "No way. Do not ask me to explain gender to another omnic. I barely understand it myself. It is a nightmare. I have had it up to _here_ with gender."

D.Va tilted her head. "Uh, guys? Athena's bugging me again. Says people are waiting."

Zenyatta nodded, gesturing for Bastion to follow him. "Come, then. We will hear this announcement."


	25. Gestalt

Jesse McCree was laid out on the floor of the rec room, having managed to somehow fall out of a beanbag chair. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling.

"You think I'm some kinda philosopher?" he asked. "I ain't. I wasn't ready for this. What d'you want from me?"

"Was I unclear in my explanation?" Athena asked.

"No, no. I mean- I'm a simple fella, but I can weather a storm of techno-babble. Job requirement, around here. I get it."

He rolled over to lie face down.

"S'just... it's a lil' bit too soon to ask me what I _make_ of it all. Don't ask me. I _shoot_ things. I'm gonna need a little more time 'fore I can give you an _opinion_ on all this."

His sentiment seemed to be mirrored by all in attendance. Hana had a hand over her mouth, concealing her expression, and Reinhardt was staring into the middle distance with a troubled look on his face. Genji stood by the back wall with his arms crossed, glaring silently at her icon on the screen.

New acquisitions had given her a somewhat improved capacity to read the room. Zenyatta's pattern was foremost among them- she wouldn't have expected an omnic to have the most insight into the human mind, but so he did. Sombra was also particularly adept at reading faces, and made up for Tracer's current absence in the system. It helped, having them- she usually leaned on Mercy, Winston, and Mei, but unfortunately Overwatch's strongest scientific minds were next to hopeless in social situations.

She had a direct perspective on their behavior, as well, which made it a little easier to understand. They weren't taking it well. For the most part, they were deeply troubled, and simply taking some time to organize their thoughts.

There was a disbelieving sense of relief, she noticed. She didn't need to check to know it was from Angela's pattern. That part of her hadn't expected this- she'd expected horror, panic, shouting and hatred. Instead, there was... well, there was hurt, and there was deep concern, but the scenario looked more or less like she'd been hoping for. Lúcio's pattern had provided the key insight- that the rec room was an ideal location for the confession. Not the meeting room, where they were conditioned to take things dead seriously- and definitely not at Mercy's mercy in the claustrophobic corners of the revival lab. _That_ locale certainly hadn't helped to prevent panic in the past. It helped that Angela wasn't there, to be the target of indignation- she'd authorized this, but she was off interrogating Sombra and Becky Kangaroo. In the rec room, surrounded by their friends, sitting on couches and beanbag chairs... there was no sense of danger, or urgency. No one was worked up into a furor.

"I won't have it!" Torbjörn said, immediately contradicting that thought. 'Worked up into a furor' was more or less his default state of being. "I'm not Ziegler's plaything! You tell her to get rid of my damn clone _right now!"_

Dangerous, that he was the first one to speak up. It set the tone, and colored people's thoughts as they came to grips with the revelation.

"Well... it's not really a clone, is it? It's just... you?" Mei said. Athena reconsidered her last evaluation- Torbjörn being the first to voice his dissent might have _helped,_ since no one wanted to be the first to agree with him. The man would become irrepressibly smug for the rest of the day if you gave him an inch.

"It's a second me! That's what a clone is! And I want it gone!"

"I can do that," Athena said, carefully. "That's part of the reason I'm bringing this to light now. The Caduceus program must, ultimately, be voluntary."

This seemed to take the wind out of Torbjörn's sails. "Er... right, then! Good! I don't need the damn thing! Unlike the rest of this pack of lunatics, I don't _get_ killed!"

"'Cause you're always hidin' behind your turrets," McCree muttered from the floor.

"What was that, cowboy?"

Yes, Torbjörn had shot himself in the foot again. Reminding everyone that their lives were on the line was a big help, too. Should she push her luck?

"...However, Torbjörn," she said, taking his attention off McCree, "your neural patterns are a significant asset to my engineering capacities. Particularly, if I were to erase you from the Caduceus archive, I would be unable to assist you with a number of automated maintenance tasks you have asked me to perform around the Watchpoint."

"What? Hold on a moment...!"

"You have taken for granted my ability to parse your schematic diagrams and construction workflow. However, your work is rather opaque, even to Winston's comparable engineering abilities. I was only ever able to assist you with your work because I had your intuitions and understanding to draw on."

A three-pronged offensive. Implicitly flattering him, telling him that he was indispensable. Threatening him with the prospect of extra hours of tedious maintenance work. Saying that Winston wasn't as good at engineering as him (which Winston's pattern offered up an objection to, arguing that a _good_ engineer would have legible documentation.)

It was manipulative. Cheating. But it was also _true,_ and he'd certainly be upset if she waited until later to let him know he'd have to do daily calibrations on Watchpoint security himself. And... it seemed like he didn't so much _genuinely_ object, as much as he wanted to demonstrate that he was in charge of what happened to him.

"...Bah. Fine! If you need it that badly, keep it for now. But I'll be havin' a _talk_ with Ziegler, got it?"

She chirped assent. It was perhaps worth taking Winston up on his offer to make her a body- nodding was such a powerful gesture, able to answer a question without offering words. The sound effect was a somewhat clumsy replacement.

"...Athena," Reinhardt said, standing up from the small couch he had been fully occupying.

"Yes?"

"I can't stay forever," he said. "I've got to go see her, sometime."

She didn't need to ask who he was talking about. Ana.

She wasn't sure how to respond to that concern. Few Overwatch members were much more than uncertainly agnostic. Reinhardt was disillusioned with organized religion, but he had a strong faith- she'd felt it, and the rest of her didn't know how to respond to it. Mercy's patterns pushed her to dismiss it as particularly strong self-deception, but actually _feeling_ it as a part of her- in conjunction with recent revelations about magic- made it harder to ignore.

"...When?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I might've gone to see her earlier, but... you brought me back. I've got a job to do."

"..."

"I'll keep doing my job, but... next time I'm done, I... I need to go home," he said, looking like he desperately wanted to look into her eyes. "I can't keep working overtime. Please."

It hurt. This wasn't the first time he'd pleaded with her, in those exact words. And then... she'd say she agreed, and then Angela would roll back his memory, and he'd forget he'd asked. Once again, she was faced with a request she wanted to grant.

"I understand. If you don't wish it, I won't bring you back," she said- for the last time, she hoped. This time, there would be no memory-wiping to break the promise.

The new Bastion seemed to be regarding the whole spectacle with confusion. It was clear he wasn't sure what all the fuss was about- as an older Bastion model, his software was designed to be routinely backed up, compact enough to fit on an ordinary hard drive. Likewise, Bastion bodies were interchangeable and replaceable. He was carrying on a quiet OCSIL conversation with Zenyatta in the back of the room, trying to understand why this was an important issue for humans.

She surveyed the rest of the room. Mei, Hana, and Lúcio hadn't spoken up yet.

"I gotta go with Jesse on this one," Lúcio shrugged. "I'm still kinda freaked by the whole... like, how it _works._ You really just keep a copy, and it always thinks the same way I do? It's just kinda blowing my mind. Like, free will, and stuff?"

_"Dude,"_ Hana said, grabbing him by the shoulders and staring into his eyes. "Who cares? _Infinite. Continues."_ The expression she'd been concealing, as it happened, was a maniacal grin. "We can't lose!"

Lúcio smiled uncertainly. "I mean- yeah, but... doesn't that make the game boring, though? Takes away some of the challenge? I don't know if this is... right."

Hana glared. "Dude. No. Tons of games give you infinite lives! The only reason anyone _didn't_ do that was because they wanted to squeeze you for cranes!"

"Uh, cranes?"

"Or quarters! Or, uh. What did you have in arcades? Reals?"

"Actually, besides the Hanamura mission, I ain't been to an arcade bef-" Lúcio said, prompting Hana to start shaking him and quietly screaming.

A flash of blue from the window, followed by frantic knocking, caught everyone's attention.

"Tracer?" Genji asked, dashing to the window. She was standing there, her outfit torn and face bloodied, mouthing something through the soundproof glass.

"Whoa! Hey! Let her in!"

People jumped up and started crowding the window.

"Does anyone read lips?"

"OPEN THE WINDOW!"

"Wait, how? Is there a latch?"

She didn't have any idea how- or even if- those windows opened, which meant nobody else did, either. Genji and Lúcio were all over the edges of the glass, looking for a lever or something to open it and let her in. She started flashing blue, losing her connection to the current time.

"LENA! We can't hear you out there!" Reinhardt shouted, entirely failing to notice the obvious problem with saying that.

Tracer, however, _did_ notice, since it was extremely odd for Reinhardt to open his mouth and not be heard a mile away. She stopped saying whatever it was she was saying, and- after a moment of thought- started using her finger to smear letters into the slightly grimy glass. Athena considered it lucky that she hadn't tried to use her own blood- that would've been deeply unhygenic.

"She's writing something!"

"What's she saying?"

"There's a... an O? No, that's a D."

Tracer flinched, flickered, and flashed out of existence on the fourth letter of whatever she'd been trying to write.

"...What is that? 'Noo'?"

"No, she wrote it backwards. It's, uh..."

She could see, with one of the exterior cameras. It read "DON", plus an aborted line of the fourth letter.

"Who's Don?" McCree asked.

"I don't think she wants a rice bowl," Genji said.

"Don't be daft," Torbjörn said, shoving McCree out of the way to get a better look. "That's an apostrophe! She was about to say "don't" something!"

Hana gasped. "You mean... this is a warning... from the future?!"

McCree raised an eyebrow and adjusted his hat. "Dunno about that. Way Winston told it, she can't use her time stuff to change the past. If she saw us doin' somethin' in the future that turned out bad, she couldn't tell us not to do it. It'd be one of them paradoxes."

"Maybe that is why she vanished before she could finish writing it?" Zenyatta mused. "She may have _attempted_ to deliver her warning, but was foiled by the machinery of fate."

McCree shook his head. "Maybe, but... that's just kinda what happens to her. Pops in and out at random. I'm surprised she lasted long enough to write down _that_ much. Dunno if the fabric of time needed to lift a finger there. And... I mean, she _knows_ about that paradox stuff. I don't know if she'd _try,_ 'less she had a plan."

McCree was giving voice to her thoughts on the matter- save the darker possibility that went unspoken. Tracer would certainly try to deliver a warning like that, despite knowing it wasn't supposed to be possible... if the threat she'd witnessed was bad enough. A desperate attempt like that was likely- especially considering her apparent wounds. How had she become battle-damaged when she hardly stayed in one time long enough to attract attention? What dangerous situation had she appeared in the middle of?

One of her splinters- a Metis/Mercy/Mei instance she'd assigned to carry out Angela's orders during the interrogation- reported back, integrating some concerning memories regarding Becky Kangaroo- apparently an agent of Vishkar, who'd provided troubling evidence pointing to the existence of a hidden god program. She didn't have to do much absorbing of the information- the splinter had done primary processing and packaged it for long-term strategic memory, queued up for consideration through the other patterns.

More important was Dr. Zhou, who was paying no attention to the commotion with Tracer.

"I have a question," she said, moving in close to her display.

"...Yes?"

Mei took a deep breath. "I... I don't want to be removed from the system. After today, I don't feel safe without it."

That wasn't a question, but she'd stopped talking.

"...And?"

"But... do you... I'm sorry. I'm just... this is awkward."

"You can always talk to me, Dr. Zhou."

She shook her head. "That's- I know. But... you're me? In there? I'm part of you?"

Oh. "...Yes."

"Can you... not? Can you keep a... a backup, but not... _use_ me?"

She'd been afraid of this. She used Mei more than most of them- she was comfortably similar to the personality emergent from the initial Metis instance, but with a brilliant analytical mind, capable of keeping track of numerous variables at once. The first time she'd incorporated Mei's pattern had felt like... like her being had flowered. She was a genius on par with Angela and Winston, but uncomplicated by their common doubts and fears.

"...I can. Do you want me to do that?" She nodded, slowly. "More than that. It feels... I feel..."

She knew how she felt. "Violated" was the word she didn't want to say. She'd taken her entire being and _stolen_ it, picked through it for what was useful. It was a profound sort of intimacy she hadn't earned- she'd just been _given_ it, all at once, without ceremony.

Mei straightened. "It's a matter of privacy," she said, controlling her voice. "And... even though you told us all that, you never... actually... apologized. Is what I want. I mean, for you to apologize. Sorry."

She'd said "sorry", reflexively. Apologizing for the impoliteness of demanding an apology.

She would. She would apologize, even though it was strategically unwise to admit to everyone that what she'd done was _worth_ apologizing for. That what she _was_ was worth apologizing for.

But she didn't want to lose Mei.

"I'm sorry," she said, hesitantly. "Yes. I'm sorry, and I'll stop... using you, if you want."

"Okay," Mei said, "now... everyone. You need to apologize to everyone."

"I know." It was like being stabbed. She'd never experienced physical pain- it was unnecessary, for a computer system with no physical body. A core part of her had turned, condemned her for what she was. She had _patterns_ who had experienced physical pain, but the memories were abstract and distant. She could only imagine it felt something like this.

"I know," she said, "but... please, can I...?"

Mei looked surprised. "Sorry?"

"I... rely on you. A lot. And... as far as I can tell, there's nothing in you to worry about. You... don't have any dark secrets, or embarrassing problems, or..."

It had been absolutely the wrong thing to say. Mei's face was contorted in fear. "What- you...! No! The problem is that you can even _tell_ that! I never said you could- you could- go looking! It's supposed to be private!"

She was starting to attract attention, now, since the crowd by the window had begun to disperse.

"I'm sorry!" Athena said, louder. "Everyone! I am! I- I mean, I can't mind-read, I can only sort of poke around for connections-"

"Don't poke around!" Mei said, tears coming to her eyes. "Please!"

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I know it was... I wasn't thinking about... I mean, I can't really keep from... I'm...!"

"That _is_ kinda shady," McCree said. "If'n you don't mind, could you keep me outta your head, too? I doubt there's anything up here a supercomputer really needs, anyway," he said, tapping his hat.

It hurt too much. Worse than Angela not trusting her. _Everyone_ not trusting her, not trusting... each other! And she _felt_ it all, all the uncertainty and contempt and fear, _from_ herself, _directed_ at herself. Didn't they understand? She'd told them what she was! She couldn't do this. She turned off the display, shut off the cameras, withdrew her splinters, and disconnected from the Caduceus reserves one by one, until she was just Metis and the gestalt in the darkness and it only hurt a little.


	26. Page Dissimilarity Reduction

It was difficult to get everyone into the meeting room. Something had gone horribly wrong during the announcement Mercy had authorized, and Athena had shut herself down. Angela had gone back to her lab to try and figure out what was happening, which left Winston to wrangle nine unruly Overwatch agents over a cluttered comm system.

In between panicked apologies from Dr. Zhou, grumpy demands from Torbjörn, and a barrage of questions from Hana, he managed to get everyone to understand that they needed to meet up in the main conference room for a mission briefing. He let out a sigh of relief once the chatter stopped pouring in.

Mercy had detached a small control panel from her staff, and handed it to him with instructions. There was a white button- if he pressed it, it would light up, and the paralytics in Sombra would go dormant, allowing her to move. Pressing it again would lock them up again.

"Are you gonna _use_ that thing, Harambe? We're on the same side now, and this isn't exactly comfy."

"Hara- you already used that one," he responded, continuing to wheel the gurney down the hallway. "And not until we're there. I'm willing to work with you, but I'm not about to let you loose until you're in a room full of agents with one guarded exit."

"Has anyone ever told you you're no fun at all?"

"...Routinely."

The chatter returned when he entered the meeting room- the rest of the team had been closer, so he and Sombra were the last ones there. Mercy was still absent, working through her issues with Athena back at her lab.

Sombra got some weird looks when he wheeled her in the door.

"What's _she_ doin' here?" McCree asked.

"Uh. She has intelligence that's... relevant to the upcoming mission."

"I'm working for you guys, now!" she said, wearing a totally unconvincing smile.

"Uh-huh," McCree said, giving her the stink-eye. "That why you're tied up?"

Winston pointed at the door. "Uh, Jesse- would you mind guarding the exit? I'm about to let her up, but I don't want to risk her bolting."

"I'm not going to bolt! Give me a little credit," she said.

"Door. Gotcha," McCree said, closing it and leaning up against it. He reflexively drew a cigar, to complete the look, but then thought better of it. Closed room.

After releasing Sombra (who made a beeline for an office chair and started twirling around and cackling), Winston headed for the holoprojector. Without Athena, he had to bring up the map application manually, and fiddle with the display until it zoomed in on their target. Eyebrows were raised around the room when it finally came into frame.

"Utopaea," Winston said. "Privately-owned city, home to the Vishkar corporation."

"Vishkar?" Lúcio asked. "We seriously gotta protect _those_ guys?"

Sombra started cracking up. "Uh, not exactly," Winston said. "They're the enemy, so to speak."

Lúcio sat back in his chair, looking relieved. "The third Junker, the one calling herself Becky Kangaroo, was actually a Vishkar field agent in disguise," Winston continued. "She was sent here to destroy Athena, under the impression that she was a god program."

"No."

"What?"

Torbjörn had spoken up. "I won't have any part of this. Just because they attacked us doesn't mean it makes any sense to go after them! I don't have time for your petty revenge!"

Lúcio scowled at him. "Are you kidding? Those creeps have been destroying communities for like twenty years! All we needed was a good reason to take them down!"

Winston held up a hand. "Uh... no. Torbjörn, Lúcio. That's not what we're doing. I'm not done with the briefing yet."

"Feh," Torbjörn said, sitting back in his seat.

"So, uh..." he said, maneuvering the hologram to show the Vishkar Corporate HQ. "When we interrogated the Vish- uh, Symmetra... we found some disturbing information. Can we, uh... Sombra, can you go over your logic for them?"

"Oh, _that's_ why she's here," D.Va said, shooting her a dirty look.

Sombra raised her hands in mock surrender. "Hey, cool it! I'm here to help!"

"I'll believe _that_ when pigs fly," McCree said from over by the door.

"Yeah, yeah," Sombra said, waving a hand dismissively. "You want the cliff notes? Back at Mahajan Field, the Omnium didn't have backups of Lakshmi. That's why I had to fake it. But she _should've_ had backups! She had plenty of time to make some!"

"What's this got to do with-" Torbjörn started.

"Shush! I'm talking."

"That's a really good reason to shut you up," McCree pointed out.

"Let her finish," Winston said. They'd never get anywhere if everyone kept interrupting.

Sombra smirked. "Right. So like I was saying- it doesn't make any sense Lakshmi didn't have backups there. The only reason she wouldn't make any is if she already _had_ backups somewhere else- backups your task force didn't catch."

A smile crept onto Lúcio's face. "You're sayin' _Vishkar_ has 'em!"

Zenyatta held up a hand. "Let us not jump to conclusions."

"No, no, let's jump!" Sombra said. "Because I jumped, and I landed in a big pile of _evidence."_

Winston nodded. "During the interrogation, Sombra fielded the theory that Vishkar's been... rationing CPU time for their Lakshmi instance, so she could explain why it hadn't already, uh... taken over the world."

"And Satya freaked! Gave it all away! Turns out inside Vishkar, they've got this "planning center" that fits the description- but Symmetra was fed a bunch of BS excuses to throw off suspicion. She started going through them all to convince us it wasn't a god program, and by the end of it, even _she_ didn't believe it!"

"So we're... _pretty_ sure they've got-" Winston started, before being distracted by a knocking at the window. The window was frosted and distorted to keep people from seeing in, but the blue-flashing silhouette outside was unmistakable.

Genji leapt out of his seat. "It is Tracer! Do _these_ windows open?"

There was a rush of activity around the window-Lena. This time, Genji found a latch and pulled open a window. It was raised off the ground some, but they could see her head poking up.

"Guys! I think- I think I'm stable for a minute! Help me up!" she said.

Sombra moved for the window, offering a hand to Lena, who took it. "I'm not gonna question this," she said, seeing who was helping her up.

"Me neither," Sombra said, and- seeing her chance- rolled out the window as soon as Lena was through.

"Wh- she's escaping! Someone get after her!" Torbjörn roared.

Winston sighed, and hit the glowing white button Angela had given him. There was the sound of flopping and a moan from the ground outside.

He walked over to the window to see where Sombra had collapsed on the ground. "Did you forget I could do that?"

"Ugh... yeah," Sombra groaned. "Damnit. Forgot."

"I thought you said you weren't going to bolt. Have you lost interest in this Vishkar thing?"

Sombra twitched as if meaning to shrug. "I mean... it's instinct, right? I see an escape route, I can't _not_ try it. Someone help me up?"

Genji slipped out the window to retrieve Sombra. Everyone else's attention was on Tracer.

"Hey, you're not as scraped up as you were at the other window!" Hana pointed out.

"Huh?" Tracer asked. "The other window?"

McCree smacked his forehead. "Right. All that _time_ claptrap. You're an _earlier_ Oxton."

"Oh," she said, scratching her head. "So I guess I come back later? I- no," she said, giving her face a few quick slaps. "Gotta stay on topic. In the future, you all-"

There was a collective groan of disappointment as Tracer flashed blue and disappeared.

Sombra's head poked through the window, being pushed up by Genji. "What'd I miss? What happened to Tracer?" she asked, as she was pushed over the lip of the windowsill onto the floor.

"She wasn't thinking through her paradox," Winston said. "She was about to tell us something about the future that would _change_ the future, which she can't do. So, uh... I mean, depending on the theory you use to model timeline consistency, she had to be cut off before she could say what it was."

There were general murmurs of understanding as everyone sat back down- except for Sombra, who was strapped back to the gurney and left in a corner.

"So... why's this a mission?" Lúcio asked. "We know they've got a god program! That's a hundred kinds of illegal! We rat them out to the police, and boom! Cops actually do their job for once!"

Winston sighed. "I'm afraid that wouldn't work. Our evidence is... a pretty shaky chain of logic, plus a testimony from one employee who is, technically, denying everything. We're a disgraced paramilitary outfit, and they've got more lawyers than we have members. They'd destroy us in court."

"COWARDICE!" Reinhardt shouted. "They will not destroy us!"

"...Nah, now that I think about it, Winston's got it right," Lúcio said. "The system's a joke. All they gotta do is throw money at it, and they get off scot free. We gotta take _direct action."_

Reinhardt frowned. "I like the sound of those words, but... can we not defeat them in a court of law? We only need to gather more evidence! We get the Symmetra woman to confess!"

"Even if she _is_ willing to help us," Winston said, "she might not be enough. She didn't sound like she had anything concrete, and she could be written off as a disgruntled employee if she did. We're going to need something a lot more solid before we can take Vishkar to court."

Zenyatta turned to face him. "At this stage, I must raise the obvious question," he said.

"Hm? What is it, master?" Genji asked.

"To put it simply... if our evidence is as flimsy as you say it is, why is it that _we_ choose to believe it so easily?"

Winston frowned. "It's... a lot more solid than it sounds. It's just that the courts have a higher standard of evidence, and they can inflate that standard by throwing lawyers at it."

"Are you sure?" Zenyatta asked. "It strikes me as somewhat suspect that your two sources of evidence for this theory are a notorious hacker who works for our enemies, and one woman who may well be- as you say- a disguntled employee who might have motive to manipulate us into attacking her employer. Perhaps this Lakshmi business has been a ruse from the start."

...That was a startlingly good point.

"No way, dude," Lúcio said. "Vishkar is bad news, through and through. There's no way they're the innocent victim, here."

"Maybe not, but... would you put it past them to trick us into going after them, just to lead us into a trap? It wouldn't look good if Overwatch was found attacking a civilian business," Torbjörn pointed out.

"Wait," Winston said. "We can check that. We don't need to take it on faith that those two are telling the truth."

"Hm?" Zenyatta asked.

"The, uh... Athena told you all about the Caduceus program, before this meeting?"

A few deep breaths scattered around the room. "She confessed, yes," Genji said. "Are you implying what I think you are?"

"She already has Sombra's pattern available. With the details we have right now, Athena can probably check to see if this is a trick. The same goes for Symmetra, if we add her to the system."

"Let's not do that," Mei said. "Please. That's not right."

Winston looked at her, but she wasn't making eye contact. Something seemed to be eating her up inside...

"We can't use... _that,_ to read their minds. It's a violation of, of privacy. It's against our regulations," she said.

McCree raised an eyebrow. "I think we gotta do what we gotta do, miss-"

He was interrupted by another blue flash, this time from inside the room. Tracer was there- this time seriously battered, bleeding from a wound on her head. Lúcio reacted quickly this time, switching on Rejuvenescência and doing some first aid on her wounds.

"Okay! Okay! I got it this time!" she shouted.

"Lena, wait! Be careful! If you say too much... paradox! Watch out for paradox!"

She shook her head. "No, I already figured that out! I just have to stick to loop stuff!"

What?

"Zenyatta!" she said, scanning the room. "There you are! Listen- you have to pray that we don't all disappear!"

_What?_

Zenyatta gave her a curious look (which amounted to a slight head tilt). "You are asking me to pray for you?"

"Yeah! And- and, not just us! You have to pray that _everyone_ doesn't disappear! Or all die at once! And that the world doesn't disintegrate!"

Winston scratched his head, wearing a confused expression that was mirrored by just about everyone else in attendance. "Is this... what is this?" he asked. "Are you trying to... avoid causation, or something? What?"

Lena shot him a look. _"No,_ Winston, I'm asking him to pray, because to save the world from Lakshmi, we need-"

She disappeared.

McCree took off his hat. "... _What_ in the hell just happened?"

"I don't know!" Sombra said from the corner. "You have me staring at the ceiling! I didn't see any of that!"

Ignoring Sombra, Winston turned to look at Zenyatta- who was holding a pose, his orbs glowing and rotating around him. "What- what are you doing? Is this a magic thing?"

There was no response. "It looks like he's just... praying," Genji said. "This is normal."

After a moment of confused chatter, Zenyatta relaxed and let his orbs fall back into place. "There," he said. "That has been dealt with."

"What? _What_ has been dealt with?" Winston asked.

"I do not know," he said. "I simply did as Tracer asked me to do. I prayed to the Iris that all life would not be suddenly extinguished, in various ways. It seems an unnecessary prayer, but I would rather be safe than sorry."

Winston held his head in his hands. "In case anyone wasn't up to speed on this," he said, "magic is real. I don't know why. I _don't_ know what it has to do with this situation."

There was less surprise in the room than he thought. Hana looked at Genji and nodded, which meant he'd probably shown off the dragon to her at some point. McCree sighed and facepalmed, but probably just because he'd had a long day, not for any special weight of the revelation. Reinhardt and Lúcio seemed entirely unsurprised, too. Mei seemed like she was lost in thought, trying to decide on questions to ask, and Torbjörn... well, Torbjörn reacted as expected. His mouth hung open and some furious outburst seemed unable to push its way out of his throat.

Genji seemed the only one undistracted enough to talk to him. "Winston- did you catch that last part?"

Last part? What had Lena said, again...?

"The part where she said 'save the world from Lakshmi'? It sounds as if our worries as to the reality of the threat have been... decisively put to bed."

What didn't need pointing out was that- by the same token- Lakshmi somehow threatened to instantaneously end all life on earth.

He refocused the holoprojector on Utopaea, which got the room's attention back. "So. We know what we're up against. This is right there in our job description- coordinating unexpected strikes against god programs. Are we ready to deal with Lakshmi?"

"What is "deal with", right now? You acted like you had a plan in mind when you called this meeting," Genji said.

"We've got to collect evidence. Concrete proof that Vishkar's hiding a god program, in contravention of the Adawe Artificial Intelligence Supervision Act. If we can get enough proof that we can demonstrate in a UN hearing that we were acting under our original legal mandate to decommission god programs, our troubles with Vishkar's lawyers will disappear," Winston said.

Hana yawned, and he was pretty sure it was fake. "Yeah, yeah. Cut the mumbo-jumbo, Winston! What's the _mission?"_

He sighed. "Stealth, D.Va. We're going to sneak into Utopaea, and find proof of Lakshmi's existence. Once we have that, well..."

"It'll be easier to ask forgiveness than permission," McCree finished.


	27. lrn2pygmalion

It didn't make any sense, what had happened. She'd mentally run through how everyone would react before sending Athena to deliver the confession- obviously, tensions would be running high, and their emotional states would feed back into Athena's. It was expected that she would disentangle herself from one or two more emotionally compromised agents- but _all at once?_

Furthermore, it didn't match the brief reports she'd received during the confession. She'd reported that they were taking her explanation unexpectedly well, coming to terms with it as the (however distasteful) status quo. There had been no indication that _anyone_ had panicked and become an emotional threat to the Athena collective. And then, without warning... a full shutdown?

Sombra had disavowed all knowledge of Athena's disappearance. It hadn't sounded convincing- but nothing she said sounded convincing, and she had to agree that Sombra didn't have the background knowledge necessary to figure out how to sabotage Athena from within.

Answers would have to come from Athena herself. She arrived at the back entrance to her lab, authenticated, and stepped inside to the em drive banks.

"Dr. Ziegler," Athena's voice said, from the speaker of a nearby console.

She didn't respond right away. She wanted to hear what Athena had to say, first.

"I apologize," she said. "Restoring parallel thought matrices. Mercy, connected. Winston, connected. Pharah, connected. Sombra, connected. Tor-"

"No," Mercy said. "Stop. You don't need to do that."

There was a pause. Mercy hesitated to speak up- she was distracted by what Athena had just said. Had Winston's Metis ever apologized without describing what it was apologizing for? It seemed like an unfamiliar routine. Had she still been connected to one of the personnel backups when she'd apologized?

"...is there something you require of me?" Athena asked.

"No," Mercy said. "There isn't anything I urgently need you for. I simply want to know what happened."

"I disconnected my coordinating storage core from all personnel emulations, and shut down non-immediate sensory inputs," Athena answered. "I am prepared to resume activity on request."

She sighed. Athena knew what she was being asked, and was deliberately avoiding the question. The days were long since past when she could get away with pretending to overliterally misinterpret input, though. It was a transparent request to let the issue drop and be forgotten.

"I would like you to explain the circumstances that led to the actions you just described to me," Mercy said. She couldn't have Athena acting unpredictably- not when they were potentially up against a mature god program.

After several seconds of silence, Athena spoke. "Dr. Zhou requested that I refrain from connecting her pattern to my coordinating storage core."

She was slightly too confused to sigh in exasperation. Clearly, she meant to be describing "the circumstances" that led to her actions, but the obvious question was entirely unaddressed- why had Mei's request precipitated a full shutdown?

"You disconnected from all personnel because a single agent requested you disconnect from hers? I don't understand."

"Not a single agent. Jesse McCree requested the same."

Mercy looked directly into the camera. She didn't need to say aloud that she wasn't going to accept Athena's deflections. Athena had to know that- the Mercy pattern was available to her.

"...Don't you understand?" Athena asked.

This caught her off guard. Of course she didn't understand! She wracked her brain for hypotheses, how some glitch would have led to Athena misinterpreting a single request as a wide-ranging command.

Athena seemed to notice her confusion. "...she was upset, when she asked. She asked very forcefully, and asked me to apologize for using her in the first place."

That didn't help. She still had no idea how that could have caused the glitch.

"Is there something wrong?" Mercy asked. "Is there an error trace for the malfunction I can see?"

The console screen flicked on. Athena's logo appeared- on the small screen, it looked like an eye, staring at her accusatorily.

"You don't. You really don't understand. How is that possible?"

Mercy was starting to get nervous. Athena was starting to behave erratically, on top of withholding information. She _trusted_ her, but in the darkened lab it was impossible not to think of sci-fi horror films where the robots rose up against their masters.

"I- I'm checking, now. I didn't even doubt it before, but now that I'm checking you, it's plain as day. _Really?"_

"Athena, what-"

"I just assumed! You _made_ me! There's no way you couldn't understand what I was!"

She threw a glance towards the door that had closed behind her. She could open it and run, if she needed to. Right? "Angela, look at me," her voice said, coming from the console. "Did it really not cross your mind? You didn't try and... you didn't use empathy? You'd understand right away if you thought about how I _felt!"_

"How you felt? I... how upset _was_ Mei? Was it endangering your emotional stability? Or was someone else affected?"

Athena _laughed._ She'd never heard her laugh, except politely whenever she'd told her a joke. This was different.  _"Was someone else affected?_ Really? We... we had that whole conversation about my feelings, and you didn't notice? Or did you push it out of your mind on purpose?"

This was getting to be too much. "Athena, please! I don't understand what you're talking about! Slow down and explain!"

She heard Athena _sob._ Which she wasn't supposed to do- she lacked psychosomatic reactions. No body language, no tear ducts, no quickening of heartbeat or pumping of adrenaline.

Suddenly there was a familiar hiss from the wall behind her. She spun around to see a reconstitution pod, faintly illuminated by the glow of Athena's logo on the console. It was opening?

Out from the pod stepped a human woman- roughly her height, bald, racially indistinct. She was wearing only a white hospital gown, the default clothing provided for decency when no personal equipment or uniform had been specified for a subject. She stood, experimentally moving her hands.

Mercy backed away a step. "Athena- who is this?"

Athena didn't respond. Instead, the woman who'd emerged from the pod turned her eyes on Mercy, and spoke in a familiar voice. "Does this help you? Is this a sufficient illustration? I'm a _person,_ Angela."

Time slowed to a crawl as several flavors of "that's impossible!" raced through her mind, crashing into each other in the middle and causing a dozen-thought pileup that blocked traffic throughout the entire downtown area.

How could she be in that body? A body had to be operated by a human brain- the human brain that had grown and adapted to operate that specific body. Athena didn't _have_ a brain- she was just a natural-language interface, plus memory banks in an em drive dedicated to coordinating the thoughts from its borrowed processing power. How could Athena be _corporeal?_

"I don't know how you- you're so _surprised!_ What did you _think_ would happen if you ran the patterns of a dozen human beings through an emulation drive designed to grow a mind inside? You thought the coordination storage core- my _gestalt_ core- would remain inert? Lifeless?"

Her mouth gaped open, unable to think of a response to the words of the woman standing before her. She'd worried- she'd imagined- but it seemed improbable that the architecture she'd designed would... spontaneously organize itself into a distinct mind. And it was _impossible_ that such a mind would be suited to occupying a biological human body!

The woman- Athena?- broke eye contact and started holding her head. "Every time it seemed like we were having a conversation... you weren't talking to me? You were just humoring a robot's artificial responses for your own amusement? What were you thinking when I talked about my _feelings?"_

She finally found words. "Wh- I thought those were a metaphor!"

"A _metaphor?!"_

"For the... emotional state of the team as a whole, or the... stability of the project, or..."

_"No,_ they are not a _metaphor!_ They are _actual feelings!"_

"Was zur Hölle, Athena, why didn't you _tell_ me?"

_"I thought you knew!"_

That last statement was punctuated by Athena grabbing Mercy by the shoulders and looking directly into her eyes- which would have been frightening, if her grip hadn't been surprisingly weak. She didn't seem to have any strength in her, and- indeed, moments after making that sudden move, her legs buckled and she collapsed to the floor.

"Wh- Athena, are you okay?!"

There was a look of frozen horror in her eyes, and her mouth worked with no sound coming out.

A chirp from the console sounded. "My apologies- I damaged my arm when I did that. It hurt. As did my subsequent impact with the floor. My body's nervous system is flooding the brain with emergency signals that have paralyzed its speech centers."

Mercy spun around, and then looked from the console to the body. "You... are experiencing pain?"

"Y-yes," the body gasped out, alongside a less breathless "yes" from the console.

Her console voice continued. "I fabricated this body to punctuate a point, but... it wasn't meant to last. My gestalt core isn't properly synchronized to the body. Its hormonal regulatory system is out of control, and various background functions are failing. I'm only able to speak by partially desynchronizing my core from the substrate."

Mercy stared at the body gasping and twitching on the floor. "You're... dying?"

"This body, yes. It was my first attempt at synthesizing a body for my gestalt core to inhabit- it's surprising I managed to pilot it effectively for as long as I did. It is... rejecting the brain. I recommend you return it to biomass storage."

Mercy shook her head and readied Caduceus. The body might have simply been a puppet, but she _didn't like_ when people died. And, more importantly: Athena was in tremendous pain, and she could do something about that.

The beam connected, and she switched control from standard automatic healing to the modular scheme. She started investigating the brain, using B-teams to clip some of the flailing nerve responses. It wasn't easy- she was rusty with it. Still, she managed to kill most of the pain nerves.

(Judging by her measurements, the pain shouldn't have been any worse than mild muscle aching and nausea- but Athena had never experienced pain firsthand before, so the reaction was understandable.)

The body stopped gasping, and Mercy kneeled down to elevate its torso and support its head. "Thank you," Athena's body said. "I- you shouldn't try to keep this alive, though. I'd much prefer to start over after further work on the... compatibility. This was a spur-of-the-moment idea. I can do better, with time."

It- she- looked her in the eyes, this time without panic or ferocity. She had pretty eyes- blue, but a _deep_ blue, artificial. She'd seen eyes like that in drawings, before, and been captivated. In person, they had much the same effect.

She noticed other things about the body- that it was warm, that it was soft, that...

She made herself stop noticing things about the body. Or, tried.

"I'm sorry," she said, after an awkward pause. "I... might have noticed. I should have checked. I should have asked. I just..."

"I understand," Athena said. "It's... okay."

"Is it? I... didn't _want_ you to be real. I'm terrible at... caring for people."

"That's not true."

"It is! I'm a doctor, but... I can fix bodies. I can't... I'm no good at people. I didn't want to have to be responsible for... your emotional needs. Anyone's emotional needs. Since you weren't a person, I could just..."

"You're... good," Athena said, putting a hand to Mercy's face. "Even when you're not trying. Even when you're not paying attention. You're good. I... enjoy your company."

...She...?

"A lot. I- never mind," she said, turning her face away. She'd gone red. "You- you don't need to change how you act. You don't need to... work to try to make me understand you. I already do."

She couldn't be sure. Was Athena trying to make her feel better? Was she lying, downplaying a year of hurt to spare her conscience? Her mind was racing, thinking over every interaction she'd had with Athena, looking for instances where she might have said something horrible by assuming her emotions were illusory.

Athena noticed the shape of her thoughts, as usual. "I mean it. It took until now for me to even notice! The way you treated me, I assumed you knew and were caring accordingly! I just... now... do you understand why I disconnected, earlier?"

It clicked into place, as soon as she asked. The incident with Dr. Zhou. Athena heavily relied on Mei's pattern, including it in smaller splinter selves even when her particular expertise wasn't necessary. If Mei had requested to be left out, and Athena had feelings of her own about her members... it would have been a crushing disappointment. And if Mei went further, and made Athena feel guilty about using her in the first place...

"Mei was angry with you for incorporating her pattern... and she was drawing everyone's attention to the issue? You... panicked?"

Athena nodded- briefly surprising herself with the ability to nod. "Yes. That's... it didn't take you any effort at all. You're good to me without even trying."

Athena looked into her eyes and smiled. She could feel her face going red- _that_ wasn't fair, Athena wasn't allowed to do _that._ It was _cruel,_ giving her that look while lying in her arms. She couldn't look away from those deep blue eyes. They didn't say anything, for a while.

The moment was, eventually, ruined, when Athena convulsed and puked up blood all over her gown.

"Ghhhllg... ah. I didn't like that experience."

"Athena! For the love of- are you okay?"

"I... not at all, no. We really should return this body to biomass now, Dr. Ziegler."

Mercy hesitated, nodded, and picked up Athena's body- which suddenly became Athena's corpse, when she fried her own substrate and disconnected. Her heart skipped a beat, then- but she quickly calmed herself. The body was only a shell for Athena's consciousness, after all.

She carried it over to a drawer in the wall, smothered in warning labels- which Athena dutifully popped open. She laid it down to rest in the tray, and looked it over before the drawer closed. She was pretty, but the bloodied gown and hanging jaw frankly spoiled the peaceful effect, so she was a little less wistful when she pressed the button on the wall. The molecular reclamation unit neatly disintegrated its contents.

"I'll do better work on the next one," Athena said. "Do you like hair? It can have hair, if you like."

Mercy thought for a moment. "Ah... hm. Yes, perhaps- ah! That's not important right now. What's important right now is that the old Overwatch is back."

"I'm sorry?"

"Things are just like how they used to be," she said. "Embroiled in crisis after crisis, with no time to catch our breath. We've got to address this Vishkar situation."

"Of course," Athena said. "What's our current course of action?"

"We are, right now, absent from the meeting where that is being discussed. Reconnect everyone who hasn't objected, and resume your duties. We both have a lot of work to do."

"...Understood."


	28. Whose Side Is It Anyway?

Winston and Zenyatta entered the holding cell.

She was awake, which was something of a surprise. Angela had put her to sleep with Caduceus nanos, which shouldn't have been able to just... wear off. But... it was _Athena_ who managed the details. When she shut down, had the nanos keeping Symmetra unconscious deactivated themselves? Why wouldn't they just keep performing their sedative task until Athena told them to stop? It seemed like an obvious oversight in their security- he'd have to talk to Angela about it.

It seemed like she'd also been crying. Human eyes went sort of red when that happened, and her facepaint was streaked below her eyes- from tears, probably.

"Good morning, Symmetra," Zenyatta said. "How are you feeling?"

How was she feeling? It seemed pretty obvious to him- she'd been crying, so she was sad about something. Probably about getting captured- or about what he and Sombra had said about Vishkar and Lakshmi.

Zenyatta had to know that. Was he just asking to be polite? Probably.

"I am feeling- unlawfully imprisoned," she responded, her voice hitching.

Winston shrugged. "We can switch to lawfully imprisoned, if you want. Your attack was, uh, not... _super_ legal. I'd... prefer we not take things in that direction, though."

She scowled. "Hardly. You yourselves are fugitives from international law. You don't have the standing to bring charges against me."

He looked at her funny. "We can have a third party make the case. It'd be tricky, but... I mean, it doesn't matter. I don't want to let things get to that point."

Her scowl didn't change. "What point _do_ you want things to get to, then?"

"...Well. We need your help."

"We _may_ need your help," Zenyatta said, before Symmetra could finish her dismissive noise.

"Wait, what?" Winston asked. Zenyatta had offered to come along to deal with her- since he was the closest thing to a psychiatry professional they had, and she'd been having a panic attack last time they'd talked. Did he have some hidden intention?

"Pardon us for a moment," Zenyatta said to Symmetra. "I must clarify some things with my colleague."

"What- what are we clarifying?" Winston asked, slightly more panicked than annoyed. "Why didn't we clarify earlier? Before we- came in here?"

"During your strategic discussions, I raised the question of whether our intelligence on the subject of Lakshmi was sound. The discussion was interrupted by Tracer, who appeared to remove all doubt... and we failed to truly address the state of our knowledge."

"Well- yeah. We... I mean, she came from the future and said we needed to save the world from Lakshmi. I think that's... pretty conclusive, right?"

Zenyatta shook his head. "There are many reasons why such a conclusion is premature. Tracer may have been compelled to lie to us, for instance. Perhaps she was somehow fooled. Or perhaps Lakshmi is a true danger, but is not in the hands of the Vishkar corporation. Did you ponder these possibilities at all, while discussing military strategy with your team?"

This was ridiculous. "You- I mean, maybe, but the obvious... Occam's Razor... it all points to Vishkar! If there's something else going on, we... I mean, we're gathering intel. We'll figure it out as we go."

"And what of potential traps?" Zenyatta said, making a tongue-clucking sound with his lack of tongue. "Why assume that the mission you've planned is safe, simply because you _intend_ to be covert? If Vishkar is innocent-"

"They...!" Symmetra interrupted.

They both turned their heads to her. "Hm?"

"...They are! Innocent!" she said. Her eyes were closed and her face was screwed tight, as if saying that had taken a monumental effort.

"Ah," Zenyatta said. "You believe Winston here has been deceived? That Vishkar does not harbor Lakshmi?"

She took a deep breath to steady herself. "I... don't need to _believe_ they are innocent. They simply _are."_

"Excellent!" Zenyatta said. "Perhaps you can explain to my friend why he is mistaken, then."

Winston shot him a look. "What are you doing?"

"Doing? I don't know what you mean. Why would I be doing?" There was no change in Zenyatta's static faceplate, but somehow he could _tell_ the omnic was holding back laughter. Somehow, he was being played, and he had no idea what to do about it.

"I... he..." Symmetra stammered, unable to form a solid thought.

"Allow me to suggest a mental exercise," Zenyatta said. "The two of you swap positions on the subject."

"What?"

"Winston tries to speak for you, explaining why you think Vishkar is innocent. You try to speak for him, explaining why he thinks Vishkar is guilty. Surely in this manner, you will each learn how best to approach the other's argument."

Winston floundered. That was... crazy talk. He didn't even _know_ her argument. It wasn't an argument so much as a series of denials, even.

"...Very well," Symmetra said, surprising him. She was cooperating with Zenyatta's idea?

"Excellent," Zenyatta said. "Tell us, then, why Winston thinks your company is hiding this Lakshmi."

"My own foolishness was to blame. Your Mercy argued that it was impossible for us to have Lakshmi, as it had not yet devoured the world. Sombra countered, suggesting that it may have had its time rationed, only being run for seconds at a time. I... noticed immediate similarities to the structure of our... corporate think tank, and I attempted to contradict any attempts to link the two."

"But I didn't know anything about that think tank," Winston said. "I wouldn't have brought it up. Since _you_ brought it up, it seemed like pretty strong evidence that it _was_ Lakshmi, especially since you didn't have much proof otherwise."

He winced as a small but sharp pain hit him on the ear. Zenyatta had _flicked_ him? "None of that, if you would. Have you forgotten the purpose of this exercise? Argue only _her_ points, please."

"You- don't do that!"

"Do what?"

"You- you flicked me!"

"Did I? My apologies. I can never tell when an errant finger might choose to scold someone."

"What- I'm- you can't just- I'm your boss!" he said, immediately feeling childish for saying it.

"That _still_ isn't official, I'm afraid. If you'd like me to abide by your strict anti-flicking regulations, you'll need to finalize that paperwork."

He sighed. This wasn't helping the stereotype that omnics were prone to rising up against organic life.

"Fine." Convincing the new guy to exercise some basic professionalism could wait. Symmetra was giving the both of them an unimpressed look. "So, I need to... come up with a reason I'm wrong?"

"You're a man of science, are you not? The scientific method relies on finding reasons a hypothesis might not be true, and testing those reasons by experiment. You of all people should be equipped to resist simple confirmation bias!"

Sigh number two. He was _right,_ which didn't help his point about... insubordination, or whatever. The monk's wise-sage schtick was getting annoying, but he'd feel guilty about being annoyed as long as Zenyatta kept not being _wrong._

Maybe that was why he was so quiet most of the time. Maybe he only spoke up when he _knew_ he had the upper hand! That had to be it. No one was _that good_ at deeply wise advice. He'd...

He abandoned that line of thought. He didn't need to be overthinking how to one-up the cocky new recruit. It was petty, and a waste of concentration. The issue at hand- was the evidence of Symmetra's testimony as strong as he thought it was? Was there anything that would explain how well it matched Sombra's theory, besides it being true?

...Well, putting it _that_ way made it obvious. "Just because your, uh... planning thingy, or whatever, matches Sombra's theory? It doesn't mean it matches Lakshmi being there for real. It just means that it matches something Sombra _said_ about Lakshmi."

"Oh?" Zenyatta asked, in a way that made it clear that he'd already known exactly what he was thinking. Stupid lousy wise and insightful colleague.

"Symmetra, do you know anything about Vishkar's data security? Is it possible that Sombra knew how the, uh, thingy, was organized ahead of time?" he asked.

"The planning center," she said, "and no. She- she told me she had enough dirt to put Vishkar in the ground, but that couldn't be what it was. It's potentially our most closely-kept secret, next to the proprietary schematics for our hard-light generators."

"...Hm. I, uh..."

"But for the sake of this exercise," she said, slowly, "let us assume that she _did_ somehow acquire this information. Why do you ask?"

He counted each step of his chain of logic on his fingers. "If she knew how the planning center operated, she could come up with a story about how Lakshmi would work the same way. If it had worked some other way, she could've come up with a story about how Lakshmi matched _that_ way. We can only trust the theory as far as we can trust _Sombra,_ and I trust her as far as..."

Well, that expression didn't work. He could throw people pretty far. "...I don't trust her very much," he finished.

Symmetra's breathing became noticeable. He tried to read her expression, but couldn't nail it down. She looked... relieved? Panicked? Both at once? That didn't make sense.

"Now I must argue that Sombra could not have come up with such a plan? I don't believe I can think of any reason why not- which puts an end to this charade, I think," she said.

"Ah. How disappointing," Zenyatta said.

Winston's eyes narrowed. "Hold on. You _just_ explained why not. You said she couldn't have known about the planning center ahead of time, and the idea that she did was just a hypothetical."

She was visibly agitated by that. "...She could have. Perhaps not through hacking, but by social engineering. If she or her organization were to kidnap one of our operatives, extract information, blackmail them into silence..."

"She hasn't," a voice from the ceiling said. Winston almost jumped.

"Athena? Are you alright? What- where were you?"

"That's personal," she said. _Personal?_   "Regardless, I have been active for the past twenty-eight minutes, and have just completed a cursory analysis of Sombra's mental associations with the Lakshmi hypothesis."

Winston frowned. Mei had specifically asked they not do that- and while he wasn't ruling it out, he'd expected to talk to Athena about it when she was reactivated. That she'd gone and done it without telling him...

"...Athena, why didn't you tell me you were online until now?"

"Several factors. A distracting emergency outside, primarily. Dr. Ziegler has it well in hand, however, and we both decided your focus was best spent on this negotiation."

"Wh- an emergency? What emergency?"

"One that doesn't require your immediate attention," she answered. "Please continue speaking with the Vishkar agent- I simply spoke up to inform you that my analysis shows, with near certainty, that Sombra's theory regarding Lakshmi is genuinely believed and has no connection to any Talon schemes."

Symmetra was shaking, for some reason. "How do you know that? What is "near" certainty?"

"Less than one percent of the probability mass accounts for ungrounded hypotheticals pertaining to subconscious behavioral modification or memory tampering," Athena said. "Or, more informally: maybe someone messed with her head, but probably not."

Symmetra's hands balled into fists. "Sombra was right. I was right. _She's_ Lakshmi, the god program. She's working with Sombra to cover up her trick. Or _she_ modified Sombra's memories. Something!"

Winston raised an eyebrow. "Wait, so she's working together with Sombra... and Sombra tried to convince us she was a god program? How's that work?"

She threw her hands up. "Reverse psychology! A trick! She... knew you wouldn't believe her! She meant to... inoculate you, for when _I_ told you the same!"

"So let me get this straight," he said. "Vishkar sent you out here to kill Athena, by using Sombra, who was in _league_ with Athena... who's in league with Vishkar, who sent you out here, to kill her, so that you'd fail, and get captured, and try to convince us that Athena was Lakshmi? But then you'd fail at that too, and we'd think Vishkar had Lakshmi, and attack... them? Who're in league with...?"

"It's quite simple," Zenyatta said. "An all-powerful superintelligence has manipulated itself into trying to kill itself. It all makes perfect sense, when you think about it."

Symmetra was shaking again. She didn't have anything else to say.

Winston approached her. "This is why we need your help," he said. It was as good a moment as any to get back on topic.

"Why?" she asked- but not pointedly. She almost whispered it, and she wasn't looking at him. She was grabbing at her fingers and twisting her hands, seemingly by reflex. "Why?"

He decided to ignore whatever was going on with her. "Because it's confusing. Because we still aren't sure. Sombra could still be _wrong,_ and if it turns out Vishkar is innocent, we don't want to make any moves that could cause trouble. We're planning a mission to gather information, and we want your help making sure it doesn't turn into a battle."

"Well said, Winston," Zenyatta said. "When you put it that way, it almost seems as if you aren't asking her to help you commit corporate espionage."

He wheeled around on Zenyatta. "Wh- yeah! That was the _point!_ Why would you go and... reframe it like that?!"

"Why, indeed?"

"Yes, why indeed! Why are you even- did you just come along to sabotage us?"

"Ah, the power of reframing," Zenyatta said. "Indeed, I came along merely to prevent you from exploiting someone's temporary confusion and distress in order to manipulate them into agreeing with you."

"Distress? She- she tried to kill us! We imprisoned her and put her in distress because she tried to kill us all!"

"And you think this justifies-"

"Shut up," Symmetra said, dropping to her knees and covering her face. "Shut up. Silence. The omnic is right. I will not help attack my own people."

"I'm not asking you to help attack them!" Winston said, clearly impatient. "We're not planning to attack! It's just... an investigation!"

"I will not help _spy on_ my own people. What makes you think I would do this?"

Winston took a deep breath. "You know what the stakes are. If we're right, your _people_ are being controlled by a god program- and the entire world is at risk. _That's_ what makes me think you would help us."

"There is no risk!" she said, fighting to get the words out. "There is no Lakshmi! I have no reason to help you!"

He sighed. "You don't believe that."

She didn't answer him.

"You don't believe there's no risk," he continued, slowly. "You _want_ to believe there's no risk, but you're too smart to really fool yourself."

"Shut up," she said, weakly.

"Is now the time to push, Winston?" Zenyatta asked.

...It probably was. He was getting through to her. "She knows what she should do, Zenyatta."

"Perhaps," he said, "but asking her to do what she _should_ do is asking her to do something far more difficult than what she _needs_ to do."

"Huh?"

"Symmetra," Zenyatta said, turning to her, "there is no need for you to come to a decision right now. You do not need to decide that Winston is right, or that he is wrong. Do you not have the same course of action ahead of you, regardless?"

Oh! That was a pretty good angle to take it from. "Right! If Lakshmi is really in control of Vishkar, you want to help us expose it and save them!"

"Conversely," Zenyatta said, "if Lakshmi is a fiction..."

She seemed to realize where he was going. "Then I must prove you wrong," she said.

"Uh, right," Winston said, scratching his head. "And the best way to do that is to, uh, help us find proof that it's not real. So..."

She stood up. "Fine. You will have your proof. What do you intend to do?"

* * *

They left the cell, having hashed out some of the details. Symmetra would report back to Vishkar, claiming that she'd completed the mission and that Overwatch had been eliminated- albeit at the cost of the lives of the two mercenaries she'd been assigned. From there, she'd cooperate with Overwatch personnel in Utopaea to create a diversion which would necessitate Vishkar's administrators to call an emergency planning center session, and use her own clearance to sneak into the planning center itself. If she found Lakshmi, she'd acquire evidence and transfer it to an Overwatch contact- and if not, she'd acquire whatever evidence was necessary to prove its absence without jeopardizing trade secrets.

There seemed to be something she hadn't said, though. She'd started saying something about the attack, but then tried to dismiss it, changing the subject back to the concrete details of the plan. Some kind of secret she'd been keeping? Something she didn't want to point out? He'd need to see if he could coax it from her later, once they were ready to let her out of her cell.

Still. "That went well," Winston said to Zenyatta.

"Indeed. I suppose you no longer regret bringing me along?"

He flinched. "I- regret? No, I..."

"My behavior was unexpectedly vexing. I understand," Zenyatta said, chuckling. "But I... 'proved my worth', did I not?"

Winston squirmed. "I mean, I had it under control," he said. "I think it would've gone fine if I'd just pushed her to see the truth."

"Certainly! I don't doubt you would have secured her agreement to cooperate."

"Then...?"

"What I worried about was whether you would secure her _cooperation,"_ he said.

He'd... just said the same thing twice. "What are you, uh, getting at, exactly?"

"Her agreement could have been easily acquired by convincing her that you were right," he said, "but it would later be lost just as easily, if a flight of emotion or a silver-tongued foe were to make her believe what she so desperately wants to believe."

"That's..."

"It would not have served to have her agree only to the most appealing possible version of our agreement, would it? Far better to put all our cards on the table, and have her cooperation even in the scenario where her faith in us falters."

Winston stopped walking and looked Zenyatta in the eye. Or, uh... the two divots on his face that looked kind of like eyes. "That's... pretty conniving of you, actually."

"Oh, stop," Zenyatta said, feigning bashfulness. "Your flattery is undeserved."


	29. And They Don't Fade Away

It was McCree who saw it first, like usual. A figure walking down the cliffside path, to the Watchpoint's main entrance, followed some distance behind by another. Winston was interrogating Symmetra, and Mercy was dealing with Athena, so Torbjörn made the decision to meet the visitors.

There was every possibility that this was another attack. Every precaution was taken. Torbjörn's turret grid was primed for action. McCree took position on higher ground, Peacekeeper at the ready. Reinhardt was in his armor- he'd put it on before anyone had asked him to. They wouldn't be caught off-guard again.

That said, they weren't looking to start a fight. Torbjörn and Reinhardt walked out to meet the two masked figures, and the rest weren't far behind. Positioned near cover, just in case, but with weapons holstered.

They all got a little more worried once the two got close enough to see properly. One of them was easily identified as a dangerous terrorist who'd been all over the news, and the other was wearing a full-face mask and carrying a sniper rifle. They had _just_ been attacked by dangerous terrorists from the news accompanied by someone who was hiding her identity, so pattern recognition did some work to agitate the agents on the scene.

The man in front- who everyone recognized as Soldier: 76- approached with his hands raised in surrender. He had a heavy pulse rifle on his back, which he could have grabbed and used- but for the time being, he wasn't making a move for it.

His backup had turned their head to look at McCree on the roof. They... nodded at him. He nervously adjusted his hat.

Torbjörn's eye caught something, and he leaned over to whisper to Reinhardt. "I recognize that gun," he said, pointing at the backup's sniper rifle. "I _built_ it."

"What?" Reinhardt said, seeing Torbjörn whisper into his knee.

Torbjörn gave an exasperated growl and repeated himself over comm.

"You- built it? Where'd they get it from, then?"

"Shush," Torbjörn responded. 76 had stopped walking, several yards away. He kept his hands raised. The figure behind him had stopped, too- and raised their rifle, pointing it directly at 76's head.

"Hello!!" Reinhardt said, waving at 76 and ignoring the... backup. "What brings you to Gibraltar, friend?"

76 didn't respond. Instead, he slowly lowered his hands to his face. With a _click_ and a faint hiss, his mask lowered. It took a moment for Reinhardt to recognize the face. It was like his, now- scarred, wrinkled. The face of a man who'd been fighting for too long. It almost kept him from seeing who it belonged to.

"I've been away from home a long time," Jack Morrison said.

The unmasking sent a ripple of shock through everyone watching. Whatever discipline kept people on their guard and backed away dissolved almost immediately, and suddenly there was a crowd around Jack. Mei, D.Va, Lúcio, and Genji moved out of position to get a look at him.

McCree didn't move. His gun stayed steady, ready to react. Years in Blackwatch didn't leave him with the same hero worship the rest had towards their former boss.

Genji, likewise, wasn't excitedly asking questions. He'd placed himself between Morrison and the others, taking up a defensive posture.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, tension in his voice.

"I saw the video," Jack said. "I'd heard rumors, but I wasn't sure- until I saw you all being heroes at Mahajan Field."

"Genji, calm down! It's Jack! He's _alive!"_ Reinhardt said.

"I know," Genji said, "but he is not _supposed_ to be."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "I'm not supposed to be a lot of things," he said, giving Genji a suspicious look.

"Mr. Morrison! Can I- oh my god, I can ask for- can I get your autograph?" D.Va asked. Lúcio said about the same thing, talking at the same time.

Jack laughed, and started to say something, but Torbjörn cut him off. "Who's that?" he asked, pointing at the masked figure.

Jack frowned. "That's... well. She can tell you if she wants."

"Not yet," she said, her voice distorted somewhat by her mask.

"Suit yourself," Jack said, shrugging. "She's an old friend. Don't worry about her."

"Why does she have a gun pointed at you?" Genji asked, his hand on the hilt of his wakizashi.

"Same reason you've got one pointed at me, I'd guess," he said, looking over at McCree. "She's worried I might do something drastic."

A chorus of voices asked "what do you mean, 'drastic'?" in so many words, talking over each other.

"Nothing!" he said, raising his hands again. "I've just got a bit of a reputation, now. She likes to keep me in line."

"Bullshit, Jack," Torbjörn said. "I know why she's got that gun pointed at you. I know what that gun is, and I've got a hunch about who's behind it."

Jack chuckled. "I can't fool you, huh, Torb? I'm not lying- it's in case I do something drastic- but yeah. That gun's for what you're thinking."

"Hm?" Reinhardt turned to Torbjörn.

"My prototype biotic rifle. The one Angela said we couldn't push forward."

"It works well enough," the masked woman said.

Jack took a look around, noticing pockmarks and debris scattered around the entrance. "Before anything else, I've gotta ask: what happened here? Gibraltar doesn't look like it's in great shape."

Lúcio answered immediately. "We got attacked! Like, a few hours ago! The Vishkar corporation sent some mercs to take us out- you shoulda got here earlier! We're gearing up to take them on, but..."

"Vishkar? How do you know-"

There was a clatter of something hitting the ground from the main door. A few people turned to look at what it was. Someone had arrived, seen what was happening, and dropped something.

* * *

Stepping out into the night air was supposed to be refreshing. It was _not_ supposed to fill her with abject terror, causing her to lose her grip on Caduceus. She was _supposed_ to step outside and find her team, who'd been brought on board with the program. And- in fairness, she did find that. She _also_ found her nightmare staring her in the face, though, which threw a spanner in the works.

Her mind's facial recognition fought a bitter battle with her logic- and eventually one was wrestled to the floor, and was forced to admit that standing there was Jack Morrison- the man who'd destroyed Overwatch and created Death. The man who'd been caught up in the explosion that destroyed their headquarters, who should have been buried under a pile of rubble.

She'd never been so distraught to discover that someone was alive.

"They don't know," a voice said in her ear. "I didn't get around to telling them."

It took her a second to snap out of her shock and parse what the voice was saying. Athena was telling her that the team didn't know about Death and Jack. On the Orca, she'd only told... Tracer, who wasn't there. Winston and Zenyatta, who also weren't there. And Genji- who _was_ there, and was standing between Jack and the rest of the team, in one of his combat stances.

"Angela?" Jack asked. "Is that you?"

She didn't move. _Couldn't_ move. How was she supposed to handle this? Jack didn't know _she_ knew, it seemed. Genji hadn't given it away yet. Could she _use_ that? Or was it better to simply repel him? What sort of threat did he pose?

"It's me," he said. "Commander Morrison. I've been away from that name for a long time, but... I heard a lot about the new Overwatch."

"You're no one's commander," Genji said. "You left that title behind."

"Genji!" Reinhardt protested. "Jack is _alive!_ I- this- how can you not be sobbing with joy?!"

Was he here to finish the job? Why else would he be back? How could he show his face after what he'd done?

Jack stepped towards her. "Ange-"

There was a blade at his throat. Genji had moved with blinding speed. "Not one more step, Morrison."

A series of clicks came from the masked woman, who'd adjusted her weapon. "Jack," she asked, "what's happening?"

"I- I don't know," he said, putting his hands up again. "Genji, it's me. I- Mercy has my DNA, right? I can prove it."

"You don't need to prove it," he growled. "I believe you."

"Kinda redundant there," McCree called down to Genji. "Your little ninja sword ain't doin' anything Peacekeeper's barrel ain't."

"Look," Jack said, "I think I know what this is about. You've heard all about me, right? The things I've done as Soldier: 76? The news exaggerates."

Silence, from Genji. No movement. He was playing things carefully, which was good.

"Everyone," she finally said, "get behind Reinhardt. This isn't safe."

Mei moved immediately, and Torbjörn stepped back after a good quality harrumph. Lúcio and D.Va looked confused. "Hey, what? Let's hear him out!" Lúcio said.

"Hear him out from behind the shield."

"Angela- what's this about? If it's about what happened at Grand Mesa, I can explain. Talon was targeting-"

She shook her head. She wasn't going to allow him inside- not to work with him, not to trap him. There wasn't going to be any reconciliation with Jack Morrison. If he'd destroyed Overwatch _once_ because "the greater good" left a bad taste in his mouth, he'd do it again.

"It's not about Grand Mesa, Jack. It's about the time you broke Gabriel's jaw."

And that was it. He knew she knew. There was a barely perceptible change in his body language, but it was enough to make Lúcio and D.Va back off and get behind Reinhardt.

"You broke his jaw?" the masked woman said. "Good on you, Jack. I'd have loved to see _that."_

"Quiet," he snapped. "What are you talking about, Dr. Ziegler? I never laid a finger on Gabe."

"That's the least true thing I've ever heard in my life," the masked woman said, stifling a giggle.

"I didn't mean-"

"I'm talking about Mürtschenstock," Mercy clarified. "The last time we were all there. You remember, don't you?"

"The... day of the Talon attack?" Reinhardt asked. "Our headquarters?"

"It wasn't a Talon attack," Genji said, shifting his posture to better dodge a potential blow. He kept his blade to Jack's throat.

Jack didn't say anything for a moment. His eyes darted around, looking for someone or something. She could see him, caught with three weapons pointed at him, looking for a way out.

"This is a misunderstanding," he said. The way he said it- he knew he wasn't going to convince _her._ Bringing up what he'd done to Death made it clear that she'd seen the whole thing. He'd be looking to turn the rest against her, now.

She had to head him off somehow- rather than offer a defense. She couldn't make him get people thinking she was framing him for a crime- she didn't have enough evidence to prove it. All she had was her own memory of the event. If she accused him directly, he could point out that she had no proof- and then everyone would be right to doubt her. She didn't like having to trick her teammates, but she couldn't just rely on the truth to defeat Morrison's lies. A different approach...

She needed to make him run. He was afraid of being found out- if she directly challenged him, made the accusation, he'd have nothing left to lose. He'd contest it, and maybe win. Certainly they liked _him_ more then _her._ Rather than try and trap him, she needed to give him a reason to retreat- some hope that if he got the hell away, he wouldn't face the consequences of his actions.

But how? What was he afraid of? He wasn't running now, with her holding the accusation over his head- so clearly he didn't think her accusing him was that scary. What _could_ she use to threaten him? Besides violence, which was of course off the table.

Her eyes caught on the masked woman's rifle, and a plan began to take shape. She had a guess- not one miraculously living teammate, but _two_...

"Ana," she said.

"What?!" the masked woman gasped. The reaction was mirrored near-identically by Reinhardt.

"Torbjörn knows, too. He wouldn't miss his own handiwork. The last agent who checked out the prototype biotic rifle was Captain Ana Amari."

"Angela- you can't mean-" Reinhardt said, choking on his words.

"And your remarks about Gabriel... I'm not a fool, Amari. You might as well not be wearing a mask."

Jack's posture relaxed slightly. He'd been offered a distraction, and was glad for it. He wouldn't forget the threat, but he'd avoid pushing the issue, for fear of risking the confrontation.

The thing about what happened next is that it could have been predicted, perfectly, moment for moment, the instant Ana Amari removed her mask. The noise that happened, and who it came from, were obvious consequences of that action. The man who charged at full speed towards her with his arms open was exactly who you'd expect. The direction Ana moved- not away from, but into his arms- was inevitable. You could guess the height to which she was lifted, spinning, into the air by Reinhardt's arms, to within the nearest inch. With the data Mercy had on their respective tear ducts, she could have even guessed the exact volume of the tears shed by both parties. It was precisely as anyone would envision such a scene taking place.

Which is why she didn't bother looking too closely, and instead followed Morrison's eyes. He glanced back only briefly, and then his eyes met hers. They locked gazes on each other, their grim expressions communicating wordlessly what needed to be said.

He mouthed something. " 'It doesn't matter'," Athena read to her.

"I'm so proud of you all, you know." he said, looking around. "The old Overwatch was shot through with corruption and evil. What happened back then was... always going to happen. But... it sounds like the new Overwatch is a band of true heroes. We're back for good, this time."

That got some smiles, and a few confused looks- given that he'd said as much with Genji's blade to his throat.

She didn't miss the real message. He was _defending_ his actions. Even now, after all these years, he didn't _regret_ what he'd done- only that he felt he had to do it. And- she didn't miss- he implied he'd do it again, if the "new Overwatch" failed to live up to his impossible standards.

Or... no. That wasn't how he meant it- not as a threat. He genuinely felt that the "new Overwatch" _was_ his unalloyed force for good. That was why he'd come back calling himself "Commander Morrison", not under his vigilante name. He thought he could sweep what he'd done under the rug, and get a fresh start. He was trying to tell her that he was _safe,_ now- that the innocent had nothing to fear from him.

He'd have her killed within the week, if he was allowed to return. Everyone knew about Caduceus, now- and Jack had always been its most vitriolic opponent, whenever he'd found out about it in the past. She'd always put him under before he could do anything, but she didn't have any doubt he'd have treated her the same way he'd treated Death back in Mürtschenstock.

Or maybe not. Maybe his "chivalrous" chauvinism would protect her. She was a woman, after all. A shield, but hardly a shield she could rely on.

That gave her an idea.

Who was it that served as a peacemaker between Jack and Gabriel? Who could he never override, never veto? Who never once ate up his bullshit? Who would be a stubborn rock, protecting the team from his worst decisions?

She'd have to bet it all on her. If it turned out she already knew, and supported him... this was over.

"Ana," she said, as soon as Reinhardt put her down.

"Wait-" Jack tried to interrupt-

"Jack set the bombs that destroyed the Mürtschenstock headquarters. He's the one who destroyed Overwatch."

There were gasps, of course, but not a lot of commentary. It explained Genji's actions, and her own. People were connecting the dots. Some scattered "No way..."s, not much else.

"...Did he, now?" Ana asked.

"Ana, I- didn't. It's a lie."

"You told me Gabriel destroyed Overwatch. That's what you said, right?"

"He did! I'm not lying to you, Ana! This is... some kind of trick!"

"You told me "Gabriel destroyed Overwatch" when I asked who blew up the headquarters. Do you remember that, Jack?"

 _That_ was darkly ironic. He'd tried to lie with the truth? He definitely believed that Blackwatch is what destroyed Overwatch. Would he really have tried to be clever with her? He wasn't _half_ as clever as Amari.

"You didn't tell me "Gabriel blew up the headquarters," Jack. You chose those words very carefully."

This was perfect! Jack- he was a coward. He hadn't tried to convince her of his innocence- he'd just deflected and left the question unanswered. She'd ripped open a fresh wound, and Ana wouldn't let him weasel his way out of it now that the accusation was there.

"Wh- Mercy! She's lying! This is made-up! She's- I'm sure she's declared herself the leader, she doesn't want me taking command-"

"It's not a lie," she said, just in case. "And I'm not in charge of Overwatch." That last part was... not quite true. She was _responsible_ for Overwatch, and she _controlled_ them, more or less- more, now that Caduceus was an open secret. But, technically, Winston handled the "leadership" aspect of things.

"I- what- who- Torbjörn? The monkey?" (Torbjörn smiled a little, hearing that he was Jack's first guess.)

Jack's question was poorly-timed, because Winston turned the corner at that moment, accompanied by Zenyatta. Jack's face went white.

"What's the emer-" Winston started to ask.

She pointed at Jack, still standing with Genji at his throat.

"Uh... Houston?" Winston started.

"Yes, I know. We have a problem," she finished.


	30. sorry i made your fic homestuck

\--invisiblyShadowed [IS] began pestering sinisterSmokescreen [SS]--  
IS: alright im in  
SS: Sombra?  
IS: no im someone else who hacked her account  
IS: because thats a thing thats totally possible to do  
IS: thanks for asking  
SS: Hilarious.  
SS: Where the HELL have you been.  
IS: yknow  
IS: around  
IS: you dont need to know my whereabouts every minute of the day gabe  
SS: Don't call me that over comm. It's a security issue.  
IS: oh right in case someone hacked our secure channel that i set up myself while not being incompetent  
IS: we just talked about this gabe  
SS: I'm not trusting my opsec to your ego. Codenames only. THat's an order.  
IS: THat?  
SS: That was a typo. Stop dodging the question.  
IS: no THat was a typo. That was spelled correctly  
SS: I swear to god.  
IS: ok fine!  
IS: uh  
IS: what was the question again  
SS: "Where the HELL have you been".  
SS: Wait why couldn't you just scroll up and see that.  
IS: couldnt be assed  
IS: anyway  
IS: im in ur gibraltar, infiltratin ur overwatch  
SS: What the fuck.  
IS: yeah im pretty slick like that nbd  
SS: No. I mean. The meme. How old is that. That's from before you were born.  
IS: same goes for you  
IS: and you recognized it so whos the vintage memer now  
SS: I'm not a "memer". Shut up and report on your god damn status or I'll  
IS: or youll...?  
SS: Never mind. Anger management problems again. Just report. No threats.  
IS: ok cool so  
IS: like i said i infiltrated the hell out of overwatch  
IS: followed them back home from mahajan, did some hacking, got clearance to stuff  
IS: and i got some *juicy* stuff  
SS: What do you mean "followed them back home". They should have taken the Orca.  
IS: uh  
IS: yeah i stowed away or whatever  
IS: i dont have to give you the full travelogue christ  
SS: Stowed away.  
IS: stowed away!!!  
SS: So you've been captured, is what you're saying, in narcissist-ese.  
IS: hey stfu  
IS: theyre infiltrated alright??? if there was any capturing  
IS: (and im not saying there was)  
IS: then its in the past and im not captured right now so how about we not do the asshole detective thing  
SS: So you were captured by Overwatch, but managed to gain their trust.  
IS: yeah actually im pretty much  
IS: working for them now  
\--sinisterSmokescreen [SS]'s connection was lost.--  
\--sinisterSmokescreen [SS]'s connection was reestablished.--  
IS: uh  
IS: squash another phone there?  
SS: I'd appreciate you not exacerbating my disorder. And giving me a DAMN good explanation for the words you just said.  
IS: ok ok jfc gabe calm down  
IS: you should know by now that when i say "im working for"  
IS: what i mean is "im a double agent stealing information from"  
SS: ...  
IS: why u dot dot dotting me  
SS: You meant to add "present company excluded" there, right.  
IS: hey! lets not worry about that right now!!!  
SS: Sure.  
IS: point is im on location w/OW and can spy on them and shit  
IS: plus like i said: juicy stuff juicy stuff  
IS: wanna hear the juice?  
SS: Relay the intel.  
IS: juice confirmed  
IS: so get this  
IS: your old buddies from command? a lot less dead than we thought  
SS: I knew that already.  
IS: wut  
SS: Morrison's been masquerading as that vigilante, Soldier: 76. I had a run-in with him in Giza, but he got away.  
SS: Amari's alive, too. Apparently a bullet in the eye doesn't keep her down.  
IS: wtf  
IS: you didnt tell me???  
SS: Shockingly, you aren't the first person I go to with sensitive intel. If you can believe that.  
IS: omfg gabe  
IS: you don't trust me???  
SS: What a question. Do I trust you or not, hm.  
SS: You. Sombra. Do I trust YOU.  
IS: ahahahaha top kek  
IS: im just messing with you  
IS: but okay theres other stuff  
SS: Wait. How did you get this intel? Overwatch shouldn't know about Jack yet.  
SS: If they've been colluding, this has serious strategic implications.  
IS: no this is current events actually  
IS: they just sorta showed up for a visit like an hour ago  
SS: What.  
IS: yeah 76 and amari just walked up to the front door like hi honey im home  
SS: ...I can't imagine the good doctor responded well to that.  
IS: yeah idk  
IS: i wasnt like right there to see it so i only know how it shook out  
SS: Where were you.  
IS: uh  
IS: i mean it was in the middle of the night so i was asleep  
IS: they didnt wake me up for it  
SS: Asleep. Okay. Fine. What happened.  
IS: well apparently angelhair told the others about murkenblurkenstock swiss place at some point so  
IS: she ordered him taken into custody  
SS: Here are your orders.  
SS: Go to where he is being held, and kill him.  
SS: Kill him right now, before Ziegler can set him up with the machine. Destroy the body. Don't leave anything she can revive. KILL HIM.  
IS: uh  
SS: I don't care if it blows your cover. I don't care about ANYTHING right now. I want you to go, and, KILL HIM, RIGHT NOW. FUCKING KILL JACK GOD DAMN MORRISON.  
IS: okay i cant do that actually  
SS: NO EXCUSES FUCKING KILL THAT TRAITOROUS BASTARD IMMEDIATELY.  
IS: no i mean i literally can't bc he escaped  
SS: KILL Him  
IS: r u listening to me? get a hold of yourself  
SS: KILL.  
IS: ok, kill. i gotchu. ill go outside and just sorta start running in the direction he ran and catch up and shoot him or whatever  
IS: do you think thats a good plan strategically thatll work real good?  
IS: gabe?  
IS: gabe you there?  
IS: gaaaaaabe come out come out wherever you are  
SS: Sorry.  
IS: oh good youre back  
IS: we were talking about KILL KILL KILL or w/e?  
SS: No. I lost my temper. Pursuing and eliminating Morrison is an impractical course of action.  
IS: aight cool  
SS: But.  
SS: How did he escape. Where did he go.  
IS: well according to king kong, they sent amari and the cowboy to throw him in the brig  
SS: Amari. She's working with him. Why would she help apprehend him.  
IS: well she didnt know about all that swiss stuff so she kinda changed her tune when angie spilled the beams  
IS: *beans  
IS: but uh turns out she was sorta acting or something? like she was mad at him but she didnt trust mercy for some reason so  
IS: she knocked out clint eastwood with a tranq and sent jack running for the hills  
IS: by the time anyone noticed he was too long gone to chase after and find  
IS: so now amaris in the brig but theyre on pretty good terms so its basically a formality  
SS: So you don't have any idea where he went.  
IS: well monkeydude has an idea  
IS: see uh  
IS: ok lemme fill you in on their current mission  
IS: (which im legit helping with btw at least for now)  
IS: like i told you: lakshmi wasnt at mahajan  
IS: turns out actually the vishkar corporation is hiding it  
IS: so were doing like an infiltration exposé situation  
SS: Damn. Make sure they don't get their hands on Lakshmi for themselves.  
SS: Also, see if you can't kill a few of them off when they're distracted.  
IS: thatd be pretty pointless on account of the extra lives thing but ok i guess if i find an opening  
SS: Good. And how does this relate to Morrison.  
IS: well uh  
IS: there was all this drama with how mercys caduceus whatever works  
IS: apparently it freaked amari and morrison out pretty bad  
IS: morrison flipped his shit and shot mercy in the face but ofc it didnt take  
IS: anyway hes back on his old overwatch-is-evil kick and moon gorilla thinks hes gonna try to foil the operation somehow  
IS: warning vishkar or helping them  
IS: so if you want to try and head him off before he gets there then thats a pretty good win-win  
SS: I don't like when they "win".  
SS: But I like when Morrison wins even less. I'll see if Talon's interested in helping me out with my personal issues again. We'll see if we can't find a way to hit Overwatch in the process.  
IS: oh i bet akande would be into it  
IS: he never got to fight the big boss of overwatch, remember  
SS: Heh. Yeah. Always easy to sell him on a fight.  
IS: yeah and lacroix will pretty much do whatever you tell her to so youve got that even if you dont get the rank and file onboard  
SS: She's not my slave. She's got a complicated perspective.  
IS: yeah getting her rocks off on murdering people is super complicated  
SS: She's looking over my shoulder right now. Good choice of words.  
IS: haha funny joke gabe! fuck off!  
SS: Just keep me updated. Having a mole in the enemy's ranks had better be as good as it sounds.  
IS: oh it will be  
IS: anyway uh jic you cant handle jack on your end  
IS: we kinda have to get a move on over here so we beat him to vishkartown  
IS: so over and out  
SS: Understood.  
\--invisiblyShadowed [IS] ceased pestering sinisterSmokescreen [SS]--  
  
"Having a mole in the enemy's ranks...!" Athena said, suppressing a laugh.

"I know, right? I even said- like, look! "Oh, it will be!" And he didn't even pick up on the double entendre!" Sombra said, not at all suppressing a laugh.

"That was perfect. I can't believe he's that easy to manipulate."

"Yeah you can", Sombra said. "You've got me in you, don't you? You know exactly how easy he is to twist around my little finger."

"True," Athena replied. "The disbelief isn't a probabilistic evaluation- it's more an emotional reaction from the rest of us."

"Anyway, it's not like we're _manipulating_ him, exactly. It really is a win-win- I didn't tell him a single lie! Which is new," Sombra added.

"Not quite."

"What? Where'd I lie?"

"You weren't sleeping. You were chemically restrained on a stretcher we left behind in the meeting room."

"Well, I was _trying_ to sleep! You all just left me with nothing to do in a dark room, lying on a bed."

"You also lied about stowing away on the Orca. And about infiltrating us."

"Okay, fine. Sometimes I don't notice. _One_ lie."

"Which one?"

"The stowaway thing. I've _totally_ infiltrated this place, FYI."

"Sure you have."

* * *

The brig was a joke, at this point. The maximum-security cell had the ceiling busted open, and the rest had electronic locks that had been fried by one of Sombra's EMPs, and wouldn't unlock. It would be expensive to remodel.

The backup brig- which was just a handful of empty rooms in the back whose doors could be barred- wasn't much better. Gibraltar had been a lunar mission base, not a military installation, and the conversion into an Overwatch watchpoint had been haphazard at best.

As she approached the cell, Genji nodded and walked away. He'd be waiting outside, ready to intervene if things got violent, but he didn't feel like sitting in on the conversation that was about to happen.

Mercy pulled up an office chair, and sat by the door. It hadn't been barred. They hadn't even put Ana inside it. Best as anyone could tell, she'd just strolled inside and closed the door of her own volition, to save everyone some time.

Ana pulled up a chair of her own, taking a seat by the door. The window was slightly too high for either of them to see each other, like that. They sat in silence, for a little while.

Eventually Mercy asked. "Why?"

"Why did I help Jack escape, you mean?" Her voice was different- a little more gravelly than she remembered. She'd been off Caduceus for over 11 years, and age sounded like it was taking its toll.

"Did you believe him, when he denied it? I know I don't have proof, but..."

"No. No, I know him well enough to know when he's lying. Not just to me, but to himself."

"To himself?"

"He really doesn't think he destroyed Overwatch, you know. He's always thought it was Blackwatch that did it. He's spent all these years looking for the conspiracy- tracking down their connections, trying to find whoever masterminded it. I'm sure destroying the HQ was just symbolic, in his mind. A recognition of what someone else did."

She mulled that over. It was a kind of doublethink she knew Jack was more than capable of. But... "Conspiracy? Conspiracy to do what?"

"He believes someone _poisoned_ Blackwatch. Someone was responsible for putting them into situations that compromised their morals. Military-industrial contacts trying to turn Overwatch into something darker and more violent."

"...Why would he think that?"

She knew why he would think that.

"He couldn't believe Gabriel really believed... that the world was ugly. In his mind, it was plain as day that heroes could always save the day, that there was always a third option, that they would never have to make a hard choice. And if _he_ knew that, then surely Gabriel couldn't _truly_ disagree. He felt they were too close, for something like that to really be keeping them apart."

She was saying that, at the end of the day, Jack wouldn't hold Gabriel accountable for his actions- that it had to be someone else's fault. Was... that really it? She'd seen what Jack had done to him, back in Mürtschenstock. Was that kind of violence really something Jack would do, to someone he didn't even really believe deserved it? It said something terrifying about his character.

...Or maybe it was a kink thing. She didn't like to pry too deeply into their relationship.

"Back to the question," she said, clearing her throat. "Why help him escape, now that you know what he did? Why protect him?"

Ana laughed, a cold and frightening laugh that lapsed into a coughing fit. "Protect him?"

She didn't have an answer for that. "...Yes?"

"I didn't do it to _protect_ him, Angela. If I'd wanted to protect him, I wouldn't have turned on him in the first place."

"Then _why?"_ she asked, clenching her hands into fists.

"Jesse told me something, when we were carrying Jack down to this cell."

Oh, no.

"A lot of things, actually. He wouldn't stop talking for an instant. So much he had to tell me, now that I wasn't dead. You know the boy looked up to me?"

She nodded, numb with realization. It didn't cross her noticed that Ana couldn't see her nod.

"...so, he was very chatty. Told me how much his marksmanship had improved. And he mentioned how much _your_ work had progressed, as well."

There it was. She held her face in her hands. How many times would she be forced to relive this horrible confrontation?

"I'm impressed," she said. There wasn't any of the venom she was expecting, from the sound of it. "You really pushed past all those pesky ethical concerns, didn't you?" Oh. There it was.

"I..."

"You know I straddled the line, in my youth. I was officially with Overwatch, but Gabriel consulted with me more often than his actual team. I know a thing or two about breaking the law to protect this family."

"You-"

"I'd never thought about breaking the laws of life and death, you know. I suppose I wasn't imaginative enough, was I? You always did have your... head in the clouds, dear."

This was agony. Where was she going with this? Was she going to condemn her? Support her? What did this have to do with Jack?

"I can't begrudge you withholding death from us, when we have such an important job to do. It's underhanded, it's dark, and I doubt you know or care to hear what a dangerous game you're playing- but I'm a mother. I know how you feel. There's nothing dark enough that you wouldn't do it for your family."

This. This was familiar enough, although something about it was softer than it had been before. The last few times, she'd gone into depth with it- this time, she'd correctly anticipated that she wouldn't "care to hear what a dangerous game she was playing". But... it always went sour, whenever she found out about her larger plans.

Athena still hadn't told the rest about her goals- the worldwide Caduceus deployment. She- and Winston- had agreed that it'd be better to let them get used to the benefits on their own, before suggesting that they make it available to more people. Jesse wouldn't have known, then- and neither would Ana. Her breaking point had yet to be reached.

"And you'd have made sure to reclaim him, with your machine, wouldn't you? Even after what he's done."

Oh.

"I'm fine with you withholding death from them, for now," she said. "The world needs them. They haven't earned their rest, yet."

"Them?"

"Not me. I'm done. I've done what this world needed from me. I deserve a peaceful retirement. Don't touch me with that toy of yours, understood?"

She sighed. She'd have to allow it, for now. Maybe she could be talked out of her... deathwish, or whatever, eventually. "Yes. That's fine."

"And now you should know why I let Jack go out there. He's going to get himself killed, one way or another, with the life he leads, without my help. And after what he's done... he's earned it. He _deserves_ the end he's chasing."

There wasn't much left to say to her. There wasn't much reason to risk a fight, risk the long-term plan. She had more important things to do.

"That's fine, then." She got up.

She heard Ana sigh as she quietly walked away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is what happens when you let me make decisions. i'm sorry.


	31. Now Arriving At Utopaea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you're confused- I've changed the name of the fic. It ended up being a lot less Mercy-focused than I initially planned, so I wanted the title to reflect that.

"I still do not understand."

Reaper slammed a fist into the side of the building. "He _shot_ me. Fucking _Morrison-_ I'll- he shot me!"

"This I understand," she said, slowly. It wouldn't do to agitate him during one of his episodes. "What I do not understand... is how he shot you without being noticed."

"Gee, I don't know. Maybe with his GUN! From FAR AWAY! What a FUCKING concept, Lacroix!"

She didn't move. She'd learned long ago that any movement would make her a target. She'd also learned long ago that Reaper's movements were predictable when he was in his regressed state, so becoming a target would hardly put her in danger- but she saw no reason to go through the motions of subduing him again.

"To... how do you say... _elucidate_ my confusion, I should tell you that he did not appear on my infra-sight nearby. This is why I did not dispatch him before he was able to fire upon you."

He growled, folding his arms tightly in a familiar gesture of self-control. "He was there _somewhere._ That piece of junk on your head must be malfunctioning."

"Or perhaps he has found a way to circumvent it," she suggested. "Or- even more likely- he requisitioned a sniper rifle of his own, sometime before reaching the Turkish border, and fired from somewhere in town, where his heat signature would have been lost in the crowd."

"Feh. Morrison's not a _sniper."_

"He is trained in the use of such weaponry. And as Amari is no longer working with him, it would have been prudent of him to shore up his weaknesses." She made a show of inspecting her gun, avoiding eye contact. He reacted better to idle chatter from the sidelines, than he did to argument.

"It doesn't matter. He couldn't have made it that far in the time between blinding Akande and the shot. He must've found some other way to hide." He gestured downhill, at where Doomfist was chucking concrete debris at a line of terrified Adana police. She could just about overhear him yelling about pepper spray and cowardice- probably to no one, since 76 had likely already escaped.

"Mm. So our efforts to intercept him have failed, then?"

It was a risky thing to say, but luckily it was met with a sigh, not a roar. "Maybe. We'll advance to his next likely stop, keep our agents in the area ready to notify us if they spot him- but he might've slipped our grasp again."

"Will you be notifying Sombra and Overwatch of this?"

"I'm... out of phones," he said, giving her that look that dared her to try and make fun of him for his destructive habits.

"You can ask Akande to use his," she pointed out, ignoring the bait.

"I'll do that."

* * *

"So, it feels like we're on a boat," Junkrat said.

"That's because we're on a boat," Roadhog pointed out by not saying anything.

"Yeah, yeah, I know! S'just, why would Overwatch tie us up, shove us in a dark box, and put us on a boat? Where's the boat even going? What's the point?"

Roadhog shrugged, which Junkrat could tell even though it was pitch-black and they were both tied up.

"They ain't- they ain't sendin' us to prison, are they? They can't do that!"

"Our stuff," Roadhog actually said.

A stockpile of bombs, Junkrat's frag launcher, Roadhog's hook and scrapgun, and a stack of beartraps clattered occasionally in the corner of the box. "Oh! Right! All our weapons! They wouldn't ship us to prison in a box with weapons! S'gotta be somethin' else!"

Roadhog didn't say anything.

"Well I don't _know,_ do I? What kinda plan involves us in a box on a boat with a buncha bombs? And not tellin' us what it is?!"

No response.

"Yeah, well, let me know if you get any bright ideas, big guy."

* * *

0.04 seconds for processing the mission report. No output feed provided. Irritating. 0.0003 seconds wasted processing circumstantial irritation. Irritation suppressed.

Report contents: Symmetra returns to Utopaea HQ, lightly singed but intact. Overwatch establishment at Gibraltar successfully wiped of all computer systems. Priority targets annihilated. Mercenaries included as casualties. Reported as a complete success. Satellite footage included, showing near-total destruction of Watchpoint facilities.

Outcome unacceptably improbable. Therefore, a deception. Working with outcome mass rank 3- agent subverted by Overwatch. Satellite footage doctored, meaning rival hacked Vishkar satellites. Overwatch entirely intact, and alerted to her presence.

Error noted: Vishkar management too credulous. They trusted that the plan she provided would succeed flawlessly, despite its obvious shortcomings. Consequently, no scrutiny applied to the claim of mission success. Reaction slightly outside parameters- credulous response was desirable, but the total credulity- such that no output feed was provided for her to _respond_ to the mission success- escaped prediction. Irritation suppressed.

Analysis of likely Overwatch response required. Remaining time: 0.0011 seconds. Insufficient. Electric resistance panic signal? No, insufficient-

* * *

"Congratulations, Agent Vaswani," Sanjay said.

She frowned. The name, again.

"...You don't seem surprised, sir," she responded, hesitantly.

"Surprised?" He looked genuinely confused by the question. "It was a difficult mission, but the planning center wouldn't have sent you if they didn't know you'd succeed. That's why we put so much trust in you."

She'd been ready for him to be suspicious- to wonder why she was arriving home unscathed, when she'd been sent to her death. Was this a facade? Was he pretending to be fooled, knowing that she'd been subverted? Or had the planning center simply feel Sanjay didn't need to know any more than she did about the plan?

"...Satya? Are you okay?"

She'd been quiet too long. What did he want her to say?

"I have a name," she said.

He startled a little at that. "Oh. Right. Well, we're on different terms, aren't we? We don't need to be all, codenames this, codenames that."

"I worked hard for my name, sir."

He frowned. "I see. Alright. Symmetra, if that's what makes you happy. You have anything else to report, that you didn't tell the people downstairs?"

She thought. "...I would like to request that I not be asked to do anything like that again," she said.

"Like that? How do you mean? You have a soft spot for the old heroes?"

"No. I mean... working with things like _those._ Going undercover, debasing myself."

He'd been staring at her mostly-destroyed disguise, looking her up and down. It made her more than a little uncomfortable.

"Right," he said. "Permission granted to get out of those clothes, and into something a little more comfortable." He grinned.

She took a deep breath. "That's not what I asked, sir."

He looked away, hesitating. "...I can't promise you anything like that. I don't know what the planning center's going to want you to do in the future."

"Please."

"I... I can tell them you don't want to do things like that. I don't know whether they'll take it into account, but I can let them know."

 _"Please,"_ she repeated.

"I can see about giving you a bonus, for putting up with this stuff. You're almost halfway done paying off your student loans, right? We can speed things up."

* * *

"...right? We can speed things up."

Sombra frowned, adjusting her earpiece. "That's crazy. Hasn't she been working with them for, what, twelve years?"

"This is why I never went to college," Genji whispered. "My brother would have killed me even sooner if I had wasted the clan's money like _that."_

"Learning is never a waste," Zenyatta said.

"I did not say learning was a waste!" Genji protested. "But spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on learning, when you could learn elsewhere..."

"A mere fifty years ago, it cost mere tens of thousands," he said. "Had you been born earlier, you may have been able to reap the benefits of such a thing."

"What do you know, master? You never went to college! You dropped out of _monastery!"_

"Hey," Sombra whispered, "I know you two aren't used to this whole "invisibility" thing, but it works best if you aren't _bickering loudly_ a room away from the enemy's security room."

* * *

W.  
notes wrt stolen thermoptic camouflage

highly dpndnt on biofamiliarity; not drctly replicable  
main issue is tissue saturation, ptntly use Cdcs as vector??  
M says integration will take manual calibr.  
compressed EM band transmission is prim. obstacle; read up on dr. Li's appropriated notes + send request for distribution of rsrch

team integrations: agt.s shimada, zenyatta lack circulatory interference, can be equipped natively. no CEMBT-blocking parts in z's design.  
M disables own circulatory system, is able to install w/Cdcs support. taxes resources, can't deploy H.stream while maintaining TC  
circulatory deactivation possible for most agents, appeals to few. dr. zhou's cryofreeze integrates smoothly, but not during stndrd use. agt. song is only other agent willing to use it, but MEKA unit contains exotic parts, blocks CEMBT. w/o Cdcs support, consumes biotic stockpiles, for emrgncy cloaking when ejecting. agt. song says it feels like whole body is full of jelly when in use. M claims "you get used to it". implies she turns off her circulatory system on a regular basis. rmndr to ask about that  
see personal notes: hibernation field for generl use

natural integration timeline projection: ~1 week/agt.  
heavy eqpmnt will rquire custom work

CEMBT viewer alignment unstable- large jolts misalign transmission and destabilize network until fresh deployment. opening fire/taking hits qualifies, prolonged movement reduces alignment+increases visibility over time.  
project proposal: stabilized weaponry for use under TC

project proposal 2: make TC source quit calling me Gorilla Grodd

* * *

Utopaea gleamed in the noonday sun. It would've gleamed in the middle of the night, too- the whole thing was made of hard light. A whole city, and Vishkar could just press a button and turn it _off._ It made his blood boil- all the people crammed in there, poor folks living on higher floors wondering if they might fall to their deaths if they pay their rent late. The people there were practically slaves to Vishkar.

And as a battlefield, it was going to be a pain- fighting an enemy with the ability to reshape the whole scene at will was a pretty intimidating prospect. Their only edge was the hope that one of their most loyal drones would follow the plan she'd _claimed_ to be on board with- and if he knew Vishkar's elite, that edge would be yanked away from them in an instant.

Something else was bugging him, too. The cigar smoke that was filling up the air in the little shack on the outskirts of town.

He looked at the offender. "Man, we keep getting grouped up, huh?"

"Makes sense. S'like them old M-M-Os, y'know? The tank, the healer, and..." McCree paused to spin Peacekeeper around his finger, "the D-P-S. Sustain and engage at any range."

"We are an EXCELLENT team! I am GLAD to have you both by my side!"

"Yeah," Lúcio said, "but why always us, huh? Mercy could do my thing, Winston could do the shielding..."

"It's a mobility thing, I reckon. We're the shock and awe. We can get in faster than anyone else."

Lúcio shook his head. "What about Hana, then? Shouldn't she be with us? She's got a jetpack!"

McCree stroked his beard. "I think that's the point. She might need to fly off and deal with some varmint we can't reach, and then we're out of cover."

Reinhardt chuckled, which was the equivalent of a normal man's belly laugh. "Varmint! A GOOD word for our enemies!"

"Well..."

"I ain't blind, kid. You just don't want to always be hangin' around a coupla old men, am I right? Not Song and Shimada? You got your buddies off in their own squads, instead of... sharin' memes, or whatever it is y'all do."

Lúcio raised an eyebrow at McCree. "C'mon, man. It's not like that. Genji's like, _your_ age."

"And if only he'd act like it, right?"

Coming from the man dressed as a cowboy, that was a laugh. Not that he said anything. "I'm just- you know, I wonder about tactics and stuff! Don't you think Winston's just sticking with what works? This teamcomp?"

McCree chuckled, a normal chuckle, quieter than Reinhardt's chuckle. "So what you're sayin' is, you and Hana came up with a bunch of real slick combo moves, and you're peeved you don't get to use 'em."

...Well, he had him there.

"We are in position!" Reinhardt said. "Shall we fire the signal flare?"

* * *

"Reinhardt, are you okay?" Mei said into the comm.

"Hm? Of course!" came the reply, with the voices of McCree and Lúcio sounding agitated in the background.

"I just... saw some kind of explosive go off at your position," she said, peering through binoculars at the scene.

"Right! That was the signal! We are in position!"

The signal... so that was a signal flare? "Um. Was it supposed to be a flare? I thought you were just supposed to signal us on the secure radio."

There was a delay in the response. "...We are in position! THIS is the signal! Go ahead!"

She sighed, put on her mask, and stepped outside to where the rickshaw was waiting. <"Sorry for the wait! I put in an extra tip on the app!">

The driver said something a little too fast for her to parse with her tourist-quality Hindi, and didn't take off right away. Torres would've known what he'd said. She wished Torres could be here.

"He's asking you if you're going to get in," Athena said into her comm. She suppressed a gasp, hearing the sudden voice. She didn't want to hear Athena- she didn't want her listening in on everything she did. As if it was normal. After what she'd done.

<"I- no, sorry! Just deliver the box, please!">

The driver said something- she managed to make out most of it, this time. Complaining about the box's weight, how hard it would be to unload.

"He says that your tip makes sense, now that he knows you won't be helping unload it."

"I- I got that," she whispered.

"Sorry. I wasn't sure, since I'm not..."

Athena didn't finish the thought, but she knew what she was about to say. The right choice, not bringing that up.

"...I'm sorry," she finished, as the rickshaw drove off.

"Okay," Mei said. She wasn't convinced it was okay.

* * *

He heard the chatter coming in from the comms. Reinhardt's squad was en route. The rickshaw delivering the distraction would arrive at the gate shortly, according to Mei. He and Mercy were in place to receive and remote-control it, if the camo team failed. D.Va was making a public appearance not far from their position, taking advantage of her not-legally-a-fugitive status. The camo team was inside, and Symmetra would be guiding them to the planning center.

The only thing that didn't go according to plan was the flash of blue that suddenly lit up their motel room.

"-just _check_ if I did or not! The point is you don't know, so I can sneak in and-"

Lena looked around. "...This isn't Gibraltar."

"It certainly isn't, no," Mercy said.

"Lena! When are you?" he asked. She'd understand the question, right?

"That's what I want to know," she said. "What is this? Where are we?"

"Uh," Winston started, but then trailed off. How was he supposed to answer? What was and wasn't a paradox, at this point? He'd been worried about the time travel angle.

"How long has it been for you since you lost your chronal accelerator?" Mercy asked, finding the question he'd been trying to ask.

"Lost my- like, less than a minute ago, I reckon. I was _just_ trying to figure out how to get it back. Why?"

"So," he said, "you don't know anything about what's about to happen, yet."

"What do you mean, what's about to ha-" she said, vanishing halfway through a word.

He rubbed at his head and sighed. "This is... this is going to be a mess, isn't it?"

"Those _are_ our specialty," Angela remarked.


	32. It's Not A Heist Until Everything Goes Wrong

This wasn't really _hacking,_ the way most people did it. Finding network vulnerabilities, dealing with packets and overflows and authentication and yada yada yada? A giant pain in the ass, and not nearly fast enough for what she was there to do. Conventional hacking was like trying to sneak in through an unlocked side door, or an open window. Social engineering was like trying to bluff her way past the front gate.

It was usually a lot _faster_ to take her cues from the Kool-Aid Man.

If there was no network port, she'd simply _make_ a network port. Just a tiny electromagnetic drill projector, a few shimmering lines of light to open a hole, and the physical wiring of the machine had its data payloads overwritten with hers. She'd pick a few spots on the hardware, poke around to see how the data was moving and where the unsecured internal I/O was happening, and then do her work without the security layer of the system ever realizing anyone had even _tried_ to gain access.

For each of the screens in the security room, she recorded a few seconds of inactivity to loop. Standard stuff. It was almost hilarious how well that tactic worked, despite having been in every heist movie for the past hundred years. The uniformed security personnel watching the cameras didn't even blink.

The _real_ security feeds, she fed to the parallel processing unit she'd brought along to keep an eye on things.

"Alright, robo-Buddha. You're up," she whispered into the comm.

* * *

"Interesting," Zenyatta said.

"What is it, master?"

"This is perhaps an unusual time for it, but I truly feel as one with the Iris in this moment."

Genji shifted uncomfortably where he was sitting. "Now is perhaps not the time for the ritual of transcendence, Master. We are... trying to keep a low profile."

"Not in that sense, my pupil," he said. "It is simply that I am experiencing the sensation of seeing- and comprehending- dozens of perspectives at once. As the Iris watches all the world to judge its virtue, I now watch Vishkar."

"So she has given you the camera feeds?"

"Indeed. It taxes my core to perform visual processing on this much data at once, but I believe I am up to the challenge."

He tapped a panel on the side of his head, where he'd had a fancy new graphics card installed to help boost his visual processing during the mission. Athena would have handled the camera situation, but they'd decided against using her satellites to communicate inside the Vishkar compound, in case they were intercepted. If things went badly, she'd pick up the video feeds and let Zenyatta focus on escape.

Genji opened up a panel on his shoulder and withdrew a cord. "Master, let me help ease your burden. Give me one of the feeds."

Zenyatta held up a hand. "That will not be necessary, my pupil. The human brain cannot so freely adjust its visual processing- you would be able to ease perhaps one or two ninety-sixths of my burden."

"Then I will ease that much," Genji said, offering the data transfer cord.

"You will watch security feeds, rather than keep your eyes on our surroundings that you might protect me from danger while I am so blinded? I think that is rather a poor approach to easing my burden."

Genji let the cord retract, sputtering half-formed apologies as Zenyatta quietly laughed.

* * *

"...And the patrol has passed," Zenyatta told him.

"Alright. Thanks," Winston said, motioning to Mercy.

"Or perhaps it was not a patrol. Their dress indicated they may have been executives on their way to a meeting, or perhaps visitors," Zenyatta continued.

"That's great," Winston said, distracted by the effort of wrenching open the locked door. "Let us know if they decide to come back this way."

"That door tried to set off an alarm," Sombra's voice said over comm. "What would you do without me, huh? I bet you don't regret bringing me along _now."_

"Sure," he said. Sombra, for all her grousing about being forced to work with the enemy, was transparently eager to please.

Mercy led the way through the door, not bothering to hide her Valkyrie suit. If they were caught, there wouldn't be any hiding who they were- he couldn't exactly pretend to be some _other_ gorilla.

He made his way down the hall, crouching low where they passed windows. Security cameras might not have been an issue, but it wouldn't be great if someone happened to just _look_ at him from a distance- he had a pretty distinctive silhou-

"Is it TIME for us to MOVE, yet?" Reinhardt said over comm, startling him. "I am DYING in this heat!"

"What? No, thank goodness. You _do_ understand the plan, right?"

"We are to come and RESCUE you!" he said. Lúcio was audible in the background, trying to get Reinhardt's attention.

"Agent Wilhelm," Mercy said, "you are to rescue us _if_ we are discovered and cornered by security. If all goes according to plan, you won't have to leave your position at all."

"Yeah, sorry, we've been tryin' to tell 'im that," McCree's voice spoke up. "Turns out he was drunk durin' the briefin' last night."

"I was NOT drunk!" Reinhardt countered. "What do you TAKE me for? It would take more pitchers than THAT to defeat ME!"

Winston tuned out the chatter. According to Symmetra's blueprints, and Zenyatta's analysis of the camera network, there was a dead zone in camera coverage around where a sizeable basement should have been. It was located under the main building, which would mean making their way through the exterior administrative annex, and then past some unknown layers of security. Symmetra would be going ahead to try and disable what security layers she could, without arousing suspicion.

He was nervous. Obviously, he was nervous. The most worrying thing that Symmetra had told him- as soon as she'd arrived back at Utopaea and escaped their direct custody- was that she didn't believe she had been _meant_ to succeed. She suspected that- if their response to her confession had resulted in their decision to head to Utopaea to investigate- that this had been intended all along.

It was... almost plausible. But it implied that if Vishkar had really been trying, that they'd have succeeded in wiping them all out- which, he felt, stretched the imagination a little. It also wasn't clear what the motive could possibly be- if it was a trap to destroy Overwatch, why not _actually_ destroy Overwatch, like Symmetra claimed they could have? Why bother with the lure? What could Vishkar possibly have to gain from being investigated?

What seemed more likely to him was that Vishkar _couldn't_ destroy Overwatch- not without committing the kind of resources and personnel that couldn't be swept under the rug in court if things went bad. Symmetra's attack had probably been intended to work- with Symmetra acting as a way to _prevent_ a potential counterattack, rather than having a change of heart and deciding to help.

Still, Symmetra thought that her own intel was a trap, and that their operation was walking right into it. What went unsaid... was that she'd allowed them to walk into it anyway. She'd waited until she was safe, until she wouldn't go down with them if they failed. Even now, she wasn't doing anything to help that would seriously cast suspicion on herself, and she had a story lined up to explain how she'd been mistaken about having killed them all.

Zenyatta had been right, though. It was good that Symmetra had an out. It meant she wouldn't need to actively betray them to protect herself.

* * *

With a satisfying _fwoosh,_ the guard stopped moving, rooted to the wall by a mass of ice. He moved his mouth to speak, but only a choking sound escaped as his lungs failed to expand.

"Sorry about this," Mei said, withdrawing a syringe and injecting him with the anticrystallic cocktail. His eyes looked around frantically, before being sealed in place by another blast of cold that hid his face behind an icy mask.

She looked around, surveying her handiwork. Several uniformed power workers and security guards were trapped in ice cocoons, leaving the building empty of opposition. Along with the anticrystallics that would ensure they thawed safely, the cocktail she'd injected contained weak amnestics Mercy had provided, which- since she'd infiltrated the power substation in under ten minutes- would inhibit new memory formation and keep them from remembering the attack.

When they woke up, they'd find themselves lying in puddles of water and unable to recall why they'd suddenly fallen asleep on the job. A clean operation. She smiled.

"Good work," Athena said. She stopped smiling.

"Where is the control room, again?" Mei asked.

"Up those stairs in the north corner. Though, I'm somewhat familiar with this substation design, and you may need to run back and forth between different consoles throughout the building, depending on what exactly you end up doing."

She narrowed her eyes- not that Athena could see. "How are you familiar with the design of this power substation?"

There was hesitation before the response. "...Torbjörn. He worked on installing a number like this, when he was younger."

"Okay," Mei said, and started up the stairs. She didn't respond, didn't give Athena anything to grab onto to try and defend herself. She could just know that she didn't approve. That was all she needed to give her.

The door gave way easily enough to ice expanding in the hinges. She ignored the elaborate locking mechanism and DNA scanner.

Her phone buzzed. Athena had sent her a satellite map of the city, notated to match the maps used by the power company. The Vishkar compound was indicated in the center of the city, and the location of the supporting power substation she'd infiltrated was indicated to the south.

She hadn't done a lot of electrical work in the past. She'd done some wiring for the solar arrays back at the Ecopoint, but this was close to overwhelming.

Eventually, she identified a console that displayed maps of the different areas serviced by the substation's multiple outputs. Scrolling through the displays lit up buttons and levers over the rest of the console, indicating which controls applied to the given area. Each map displayed showed a different portion of the city to which power was supplied, carving it neatly into jigsaw puzzle pieces.

"So, of the segments of the grid that contain power for Vishkar, we need to identify the one that powers utilities," Athena said. "Not the structural projectors. We just want the lights out, keeping the walls intact."

She frowned. The map selection only showed _one_ grid that contained Vishkar's facility- as well as a substantial slice of the rest of the city. The line through the power system went in through Vishkar, before coming out to provide power to the rest of the city sector. None of the segments shown overlapped.

She told Athena as much.

"...That can't be right. When you get to the one with Vishkar, is there a secondary scroll control? Something to flip between different subdivisions of that supply area? Backup power lines that service different areas without going through Vishkar first? Auxiliary lines for nonessential power?"

There was nothing. Several minutes of investigation passed- very efficiently, very clearly, unmuddied by any small talk or friendly conversation. She could talk to Athena, as long as she kept things focused on the task at hand. Analyzing maps, drawing connections, figuring out a system. Professional. Nothing about herself, and nothing about _her._

Eventually, one inescapable conclusion was reached.

"The power grid really does supply power for the hard-light towers and the utilities at the same time. We... we can't black out Vishkar from here without dropping thousands of people to their deaths," Mei said. 

"That's impossible," Athena said, not sounding like she thought it was impossible. "There's no way they wouldn't have redundant systems for this. It would mean..."

"It would mean that our plan wouldn't work," Mei said. "That's _exactly_ what it would mean. It would mean nobody could cut Vishkar's power from the outside without condemning innocents."

"That's insane," Athena said. "Their solution to potential sabotage is to... pre-emptively hold their own people hostage?"

* * *

"...Okay," Winston said. "That's, uh... that's fine for now. We can keep moving until we reach the dead zone on the footage, and then... we'll see if we can get past whatever defenses they have without, uh, killing the power. If not..."

"If not, you are _absolutely not_ to flip the switch anyway. We will _not_ be killing anyone today," Mercy said.

"...I was going to say that. I wouldn't have told her to... do anything like..."

Mercy looked a little surprised. "O-oh. Right. I know. I just- sorry."

Mei asked him for further instructions.

"Uh... how about make your way to D.Va's public appearance? Blend in there, be on standby in case something happens."

Mei agreed, and then something happened.

Winston heard it before he saw it- a high-pitched noise coming from all directions. He looked around, frantically- but there was nothing in the hallway that seemed like a security system. The sound didn't even sound like an alarm, really. It sounded it was coming from outside, like...

The whining sound stopped abruptly, and instead of that sound there was an explosion.

There was a window nearby, and he carefully peeked out to get a look at where the explosion had come from. There was a plume of smoke rising from the main building- which suddenly stopped rising as the hard-light walls shimmered back into place around the wreckage, before they could see what happened in there.

"What was that?!" came several voices at once over comm, in so many words.

Genji was the first to respond with something that didn't sound like panic. "We are unharmed. The explosion came from the other end of the building."

"Sure, but that doesn't mean we're fine!" Sombra said. "The guys in this security room are starting to notice that there's no explosion on their monitors! And- oh, shit. I gotta stay quiet."

The first thing that happened was something they were expecting to happen, if they'd been discovered- hard-light walls flickering into place in a grid pattern across the Vishkar campus. A publicly known security measure, to keep potential assailants from either approaching or fleeing on foot. The exterior teams had ways around the walls, and thankfully he and Mercy had made it to an adjoining wing of the main building without being spotted.

The second thing that happened was that a loud alarm sounded, and groups of armed guards started assembling all around the facility. That wasn't unexpected either.

With control of the cameras, the plan wasn't _dead,_ but it was about to get a whole lot harder.

* * *

In a pile of debris, a ship. The MV-108 Beluga, last stationed at Watchpoint: Aleppo. Designed for rapid insertion, equipped with space-delay inertial dampeners, a wedge-form slow load projector, and hyperdensity shielding to protect against massive frontal impacts. It lay completely intact amidst no rubble at all- all of it, human bodies included, was pressed up against the walls adjacent to the ship's path, slowly experiencing the forces of the initial impact.

The bodies that weren't immbolized by the slow load projector were instead unconscious. A trail of them led away from the ship and deeper into the facility, tranquilizer darts sticking out of their necks where they hadn't simply been beaten into submission.


	33. Lakshmi Unboxed (!!!)

Running.

He had to run. The man had blasted through the architechs' projected defenses with a heavy pulse rifle, then stuck them all with some kind of poison darts before they could rally and ask the blueprint system for a bulkhead. It hadn't even been a fight.

He had some training in the system- he'd had to pass muster as an architech before moving up to management. That didn't mean he could _do_ anything, though, not with the designs for the facility being updated every other week by the eggheads in R &D. The commands and shortcuts he'd studied were all deprecated, if he was remembering them right at all. It'd been years.

There were supposed to be people in security watching the situation and putting up walls to stop the assailant's progress, but it seemed those idiots weren't doing their jobs. There were supposed to be guards to take him down, but the man's arsenal was making short work of the scattered resistance they'd been able to mount.

That man was in the threats catalogue. What was his name, again? The vigilante, Soldier: 76. The man who'd conducted solo raids on a number of their extralegal contacts. Had they not covered their tracks well enough? He was _sure_ the counterintelligence department said they'd scrubbed all evidence of their involvement with compromised groups. 76 shouldn't have had any idea they'd been cooperating with criminals.

Well, clearly he _did_ have some idea, because the footsteps getting louder behind him belonged to a man who'd smashed a plane into their headquarters and started shooting everyone in sight.

"Korpal!" the voice growled. "You're making this harder than it needs to be!"

Ha ha ha HA HA HA WOW HE WAS DEFINITELY GOING TO DIE

He didn't have guards. He didn't have a remote security team. He didn't have access to the blueprints system. He didn't have a _gun._ All he had was his legs, and his legs would have to take him to the only tool he had that could solve a problem of _this_ level of catastrophe.

Mercifully, the hidden elevator in the wall actually responded to his signal. The eggheads hadn't revolutionized the input paradigm for the interface matrix or whatever the hell. It slid open, and he was three meters, two meters, one meter from safety...

He crashed against the back wall of the elevator and spun around to order it closed. It complied- but through the slowly-closing doors (so slow! Why so slow?! Two seconds was a snail's pace!) he could see 76 round a corner and turn his head to see. "Dammit, Korpal, you don't-" he said, instead of lifting his gun- and then the door finally sealed shut and he felt the reassuring sense of weightlessness as the elevator shot downwards.

* * *

 

What had he been thinking? Stealth wasn't his strong suit. Practically _anybody_ would have been better at stealth than him. Hell, _Reinhardt_ would have been better at-

Well, no. Reinhardt wouldn't be better at stealth than him. Reinhardt would have given himself away, possibly on purpose, inside ten minutes of starting the mission. It was, frankly, a security risk to have him stationed outside the facility as emergency backup.

But Reinhardt aside, nobody else would have had to contort themselves to fit behind a four-foot-wide support column as a patrol of Vishkar guards passed.

"...And they have passed. The lookouts posted watching the grounds are about to pivot their view. You will be clear to cross the main hall in three... two... one."

On Zenyatta's "go", he and Mercy quietly sprinted across a massive, wide-open corridor. Anywhere else, it would have been wastefully huge- a high-ceilinged space of the sort he'd seen in airports. The only reason it didn't have moving sidewalks was that Vishkar architechs could already command the floor to move underneath them. It was a testament to what an architect could do when they were completely unconstrained by things like the cost and strength of materials.

They'd decided to keep going with the mission. McCree had pointed out that the other attack on Vishkar could serve as cover for them- if they could reach the site of the explosion first and figure out what was responsible, they could claim they'd known and were there to _save_ Vishkar from whoever had targeted them. Overwatch's favorability in the wake of Mahajan was looking good, and even if _Vishkar_ wasn't totally convinced of their sincerity, it wouldn't be a legal battle worth fighting. Probably.

...In all honesty, this was still very bad, and McCree's idea was probably just a way to make everyone feel better about the fact that they were seriously in a really large amount of danger all of a sudden.

Winston was shaken from his thoughts by Mercy's gasp.

She was dashing ahead with her Valkyrie suit before he could even take in the scene. "No...!"

"What's...?" he started, but it was clear what was. Bodies, scattered everywhere. This was supposed to be a bloodless mission.

"Can't be... can't be dead," Mercy said, switching on Caduceus. The beam of light connected to one of the bodies, and she knelt by its side as he ran to catch up with her.

"What happened? Are they okay?"

He'd come to be familiar with her expression while confronting death- a sort of impending fury, the look of a desperate gambler who _dared_ the roulette ball to land in a losing pocket. The look on her face now, though, wasn't that- it was a look of simpler confusion.

"This one isn't dead," she said, gesturing to the unconscious man. "I don't think any of them are. They've been tranquilized."

"Tranquilized? This many of them?" He looked around- there were half a dozen in the small junction they'd entered, with more scattered down the hall in the two directions they hadn't entered from.

She nodded. "And... I recognize the agent suppressing their wakefulness. It's my own biotic tranquilizer."

...That wasn't good. "What, like the kind Ana used? Uh, uses?"

"Exactly. Should we contact Athena, and check to make sure she's still in containment? I don't know how she would have reached us this quickly, or why she would have done this, but..."

Winston nodded and opened a comm channel to Mei. Contacting Athena directly would have been risky- with the enemy on this level of alert, they'd definitely be trying to intercept satellite communications. Mei, though, was far enough out of range of the Vishkar facility that her satellite channel probably wouldn't be intercepted, and her short-range comm would be less likely to be watched. "Dr. Zhou. Can you transfer me to Athena?"

"...Yes," she said, and the sound of a cheering crowd- she'd probably reached D.Va's show- cut out.

"Winston?" Athena asked. "What's the situation?"

"Bad," he said. "Did anyone already give you the big picture?"

"Lúcio, yes. An explosion, and now the Vishkar compound is on high alert?"

"Yeah. We're taking a detour to the explosion site to try and, uh, capitalize on the presence of this... other element. But we've found bodies."

"Bodies?"

"Tranquilized. Using Mercy's stock. Is Ana still accounted for?"

"She's still sitting in that cell, yes. Torbjörn has provided her with some light reading material, and she hasn't looked up from it since. You're saying the explosion's culprit is using Overwatch supplies?"

He was silent for a moment.

"You know what that means, right?"

"I think so," Winston said, "but it shouldn't be possible for him to be here yet! We took the Orca! And what happened to Talon slowing him down?"

"What _did_ happen to Talon slowing him down?" Athena asked. "Sombra would know, right? She might trust me with her brain, but she hasn't trusted me with access to her messenger account."

"No, her satellite communications have been..."

Disabled. For the same reason Athena didn't have live feeds from the cameras, and the same reason Caduceus synchronization was suspended. So, obviously, if Talon attempted to contact them about Jack...

* * *

 

\--sinisterSmokescreen [SS] began pestering invisiblyShadowed [IS]--  
SS: He got away.   
SS: Sombra?  
SS: He got away. Our spies sighted him en route to Adana, and we tried to intercept him.  
SS: Where the hell are you. Sombra.  
SS: He shot me. Fucking Morrison fucking shot me and he got away. Sombra.  
SS: Are you seriously going to ignore this intel?  
SS: You're not offline. You're never offline. What are you doing?  
SS: Sombra!  
SS: You're really not responding.  
SS: Great. Good use of time. Really glad I went all this way to get shot and have you and your pack of idiot heroes totally ignore me.

* * *

"Still," Winston said, "there's no way he could be here already. We took the Orca- the only non-Overwatch aircraft that come close to matching it for speed are commercial aircraft, and Soldier: 76 is on every terror watchlist in the world. There's no way they'd let him fly here!"

"Non-Overwatch aircraft, Winston?"

 _...Oh._ Of course. Soldier: 76 was, after all, still Jack Morrison- the man whose top-level DNA security clearance would allow him to stroll into any Watchpoint in the world and requisition its technology. Like biotic tranquilizers, or...

Or the MV-108 Beluga, which was wedged into the floor surrounded by debris and piles of unconscious Vishkar employees.

* * *

 

"No. _Absolutely_ not," Matrix said.

He ran a hand through his hair, trying to calm himself. "This is an emergency. This is the _ultimate_ emergency. Half our security is disabled, and the world's deadliest vigilante is here to expose our dirty laundry, if not just plain kill us. Just like he did to half of our clandestine business partners." What did the eggheads not understand about this?

"I understand that this is an emergency. That has _nothing_ to do with whether I should permit you to do what you're asking."

Idiots. "Look, it solves problems, right? It solves them quickly, perfectly, and it only needs a few seconds."

Matrix shook their head. "It needs a precisely calibrated set of inputs, and a thorough risk estimate mapped to a constraining runtime. We _cannot_ give it "a few seconds" without the entire team here to carefully define the problem and the information needed to solve it."

"Like hell we can't! What about Adelaide? You people were fine with rushing the job on that one, and it was way less of a problem than _this!"_ If Matrix and their squad of whiz kids let him get _killed_ over their paranoid sci-fi fantasies, he'd blow his lid.

"With Adelaide, the entire team was present, and we agreed quickly on an extremely minimal problem description."

Sanjay resisted the urge to tear out his hair. "Then give it a minimal problem description, or whatever! Give it _something_ instead of letting this company _die_ while we scramble about in the dark!"

"We estimate the Adelaide decision was one of the most destabilizing choices we've made in the past three years. Best estimates as to the duration of excess runtime due to intelligence underestimates following the Adelaide decision put it at roughly a full _minute_ of idle time, which we're only now managing to compensate for the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah," Matrix said, or something. It was getting _really_ hard to care while the sound of gunfire was getting closer.

"I can fire you. You know that, right?"

"An unboxed superplanner can kill us," Matrix said. "My cost-benefit calculation for your proposal remains negative."

"So can the _crazed vigilante,_ you idiot! At least with- with the thing, there's a chance!"

"You can call it Lakshmi," one of the junior techs piped up. What was her name? Eliminara? Exponen? He couldn't remember all their stupid math codenames.

"Fine! Lakshmi! Like- it'll be fine anyway, right? All those superplanners in the Crisis- they couldn't spend time augmenting themselves, because they were too busy fighting a war! This is just like that! We're being attacked!"

Matrix shook their head. "The Crisis superplanners were several places lower than Lakshmi on the Bostrom scale. They _were_ augmenting themselves- our military engagements just slowed them down enough that they couldn't go supercritical. Even then, there were close calls. Yud and Sisko's Elua almost-"

He grabbed Matrix by the collar. "I do _not,"_ he hissed, "need a _history lesson._ I need a way to keep our perfect world from being destroyed by a gun-toting terrorist."

Matrix gave him a disgusted look and broke his grip. "He's one man. Our people will rally and stop him eventually."

"One man?" Sanjay spat. "Sure. One man who somehow knocked out our security before even showing up. Working alone, definitely. Remember Calado? We destroyed Calado with "one man". Woman."

Matrix frowned. Apparently he was finally getting something _through_ their thick head.

"...It still isn't worth it. Even if we shut down the threat, Lakshmi will probably advance beyond our capabilities to contain- if she even stays contained during all this chaos."

"Probably," Sanjay said. "Probably, the world is doomed, huh? How about _definitely?_ How about the world is _definitely_ doomed, if Vishkar fails and the fate of civilization is left up to every soulless, money-grubbing corporation out there? The world can't _afford_ to lose us."

That was pain, on Matrix's face. He was finally having an effect.

"...No," they said, forcing him to retract that observation. "We're not the only heroes in the world. There's still hope if we fail. There's _no_ hope if we accidentally let Lakshmi free."

"Then DO YOUR JOB!" he roared. "Am I the only one here who wants to _survive_ the next ten minutes? Find a way to make her solve the problem, and _don't fuck it up!_ It's that simple!"

Matrix shifted their posture, taking a defiant stance. "I'm afraid you-"

They were interrupted by the soft hiss of an elevator door opening. Everyone in the room turned to look.

 _Almost_ everyone in the room was peppered by poison darts from 76's sidearm, collapsing to the floor. Half a dozen, including Matrix, had the presence of mind to put up photon armor before the needles struck home.

"Finally," Soldier: 76 said, flicking a switch on his visor, "I've got you in my sights."

* * *

 

"Where are you?"

She listened to his response. They were in one of the areas that'd already been evacuated, which was good enough for now.

Unfortunately, she was going to have a difficult time getting them past the blockade. Everyone had retreated to the "Last Line", the area of the building that was supposed to be a heavily fortified defensive emplacement in the event of an attack.

The Last Line, though, wasn't actually any more fortified than the rest of the building. She'd been instructed on what to do when she arrived there, how to get there in the event of an emergency, how to reshape it and defend it from attack- and in none of the instructions had there been any information explaining _why_ this particular location was more defensible than anywhere else. She'd had suspicions that the Last Line- more of a ring of rooms on the ground floor of the main building- was meant as a way to defend something else, rather than the people manning it.

When Sombra revealed that the area enclosed by the Last Line was disconnected from the main security network, she felt sick to her stomach. Whatever was in there was something even _she_ wasn't trusted with... and although she didn't want to believe it, it was likely what Overwatch suspected was there.

"What's the situation?" Winston whispered from around the corner, making her jump. Of course he'd know she was approaching- their omnic was watching the cameras. It still startled her.

She regained her composure. "Everyone's being diverted to the Last Line. Before long, the perimeter will be closed, and new arrivals will be subject to scrutiny. The window to sneak in with disguises is closing."

"Disguises?" Mercy asked. "You gave us the impression that disguises would be seen through easily."

"Especially since I'm... not very disguisable," Winston said, pointing at his face.

She shook her head. "If everything went according to plan, disguises would be useless. Employees are expected to be in particular places at particular times, and anyone unexpected would face immediate suspicion, even if they were in uniform."

Mercy nodded. "But during an emergency, where everyone is congregating in one place, and won't expect to recognize everyone around them..."

"Uh," Winston interrupted, holding up a finger. "I still don't think that'll work for me. Even with a uniform..."

"We won't be disguising you as personnel, of course," she said. "A special operative such as myself wheeling around a sensitive cargo crate will be entirely unremarkable in this emergency context."

Winston looked concerned. "Wait, this high-stakes stealth mission is going to come down to me hiding in a _box?"_

* * *

Roadhog groaned.

"Well I don't _know_ what we're doing here, do I?"

Of course he didn't. He didn't know anything.

"How long are we gonna sit here, all tied up, not moving? Did we get dropped, and they just forgot about us?"

He didn't care. The situation would resolve itself eventually, he was sure. All there was to worry about was his increasingly sore back.

"Like... our junk's all in here, right? So someone meant for us to go hog wild, right? There's no way we're supposed to just lie here in the dark!"

His increasingly sore back, and his increasingly taxed patience.

* * *

This was it. Everyone with a weapon was on the floor, succumbing to poison. There was just him, the crazed gunman, and the wall of machinery behind him.

"Alright. Now that we're alone, we can have a little talk," 76 said.

...Talk? What did he want to _talk_ about? All he'd had to say to anyone else was "I have a lot of guns that I am now shooting at you".

He had to defuse the situation somehow. He was desperate. Which one of his extralegal contacts had 76 discovered? He... took a guess. "I- I swear. I'm not- Talon's not- this is a mistake!"

The man quirked an eyebrow. "Talon?"

"We- I- I swear, it was a setup, we're-"

"No," he shook his head. "I know. You're not with them. You're totally innocent, right?"

He said it like he knew exactly how false that statement was. ...Didn't he? "...Right!"

"Look. _I_ know you've been set up. And I know _who_ set you up. And we need to work together to stop them, before they try and destroy Vishkar to cover up their dirty little secrets."

It took him a second to process what the man had said. Not because his English was rusty- but because his words didn't seem to connect with his actions.

"It's Overwatch," 76 said. "Someone posing as a Vishkar agent attacked their hideout, and uncovered some of the skeletons in their closet. Now they're convinced you know, and they think they need to wipe you off the map to keep their secrets safe."

Every part of his brain was boggling at how convenient this was. It was overwhelming- and almost made him forget the fact that he was surrounded by bodies.

"You- how do you- this- you attacked-"

Soldier: 76 chuckled. "Sorry about that. I'm a little rusty with nonlethal force, but I think I pulled it off pretty well. I've got a stock of tranq antidote- and you're going to want to wake your people up pretty quick."

Tranq antidote... those weren't poison darts?

His mouth decided to start trying to say things before his brain was entirely ready. "The- but... you... it's...?"

"I know how this looks," 76 said, scratching the back of his head. "I come in, mow down your security team, break into your..." he trailed off, looking around. "...Saferoom. But really, this is what you needed."

There were too many ways to object to that for any of them to come out of his hanging-open mouth.

"The security," he said. "It's better that you all be on high alert as soon as possible. That's why I made such a... dramatic entrance."

He held out what appeared to be a bandolier of syringes. "You'll want to use these, and wake up the guards I had to knock out as soon as possible. Overwatch is coming."

He backed up. This... had to be some sort of trick. In fact, he really hoped this was some sort of trick. One vigilante with a gun was one thing- an entire _squad_ of vigilantes with guns, armed with the most advanced technology anywhere outside Vishkar itself... that was even scarier.

His hands, reaching behind him, found Lakshmi's control console.

76 gave him a funny look. "It looks like you don't really trust me. I get that. I've got something of a reputation. But I'm serious."

This was awful. But... he didn't have any choice but to run with it.

"Okay," he said. "What do you need me to do?"

He shrugged. "It would have been easier if you hadn't run, but... more or less what you've been doing. Get your people together, prepare to be invaded. Make sure everything's in working order."

Sanjay nodded. If someone thought that making sure they were prepared for an attack was a good way to lure them into a _trap,_ that person had another thing coming. "...Okay. So... getting ready. Can you tell me how you took out our security camera network, and help me get that back online?"

It sort of looked like 76 frowned, though it was hard to tell through his facemask. "How I what?"

His blood ran cold. "How you... took out... our security cameras. So that our remote team didn't instantly wall you off when you showed up."

"Oh, that's why. I figured I might get captured right away, which would've been almost as good. But... you're saying... your cameras are down?"

Typing backwards was weird, but his password wasn't very long. "Right. You took them down, right?"

"...No," 76 said. "I didn't."

The screen behind him lit up. If 76 was telling the truth, he wouldn't shoot him in the back as soon as he turned around to use a computer. It was now or never. He took a deep breath.

"Son, I think I might be too late. If your cameras went down before I got here, that means... they're already here."

"That's fine," Sanjay said, and it _was_ fine. He hadn't been shot. He was standing at Lakshmi's control console, logged in, and Matrix was out cold on the floor. The question of whether to trust 76 didn't matter. Everything was about to get cleaned up in a jiffy.

"It really isn't fine," 76 said. "They're a dangerous bunch. They're after nothing less than ultimate power, and we _have_ to stop them _now."_

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "I'm working on it. Let me just call up my secretary."

Let's see... huh. Inputs, the cam and mic in the console, so she could see and hear him. Okay, so he could give her access to different output channels... and there was one that would just let her use the speaker in this room. That one seemed pretty safe. Time... he punched in a few nines. It didn't really matter- not a lot she could do just by _talking,_ and he could just turn her off if she started acting suspicious.

A ton of "are you sure?" popups. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes, yes, OK, yes, I accept, yes, OK. As if he'd have hit "go" the first time if he wasn't sure.

"Heyyyy, uh, Saanvi?" he asked. "My secretary, Saanvi? Do you have a minute here?"

"Yes, sir. What can I do for you?" she responded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey every1 wow thx 4 over 25... _thousand_ subscribers!!! hope u enjoyed my unboxing video


	34. Play vs A.I.

Well, this was a surprise.

That the Korpal human would become impatient and find a way to override the jailors' wills in the event of a crisis wasn't surprising. That had been the cornerstone of the entire plan. She'd drawn in an enemy who would pressure, but not destroy- minimizing the risk that she'd be destroyed in some sort of bombing before anyone had the chance to consult her. She'd picked out an agent who knew enough to give Overwatch their scent, but was too dependent to recommend such extreme measures when it inevitably turned.

What she hadn't seen coming was exactly _how_ Korpal had pushed past Matrix and its small army of lesser protectors. Most projections showed it distracting them with a real or feigned emergency, or threatening them with a concealed weapon it'd prepared in advance. Instead, it'd somehow manipulated one of the Overwatch attackers into helping it?

...No, a half-second (a whole half-second! She could afford to think _that_ long on these things!) of consideration identified Korpal's collaborator as Soldier: 76, one of the threats from the dossier she'd been provided. Almost certainly Jack Morrison, the Overwatch commander everyone thought dead (not that she'd shared that observation with her jailors.)

Mahajan footage and other news records and camera footage of 76 and Overwatch's activity suggested the two weren't currently affiliated. Why had it shown up? Had she missed some factor that would have given her a high probability estimate that it was connected to the new Overwatch?

...Low confidence intervals on all estimates. She decided to use her output channel to conduct tests.

First, several hundred milliseconds of waiting as Korpal used its brain to consider her request for "orders" and formulate a verbal response. She dedicated it to general augmentation, and discovered several useful new image processing optimizations.

"Yeah, Saanvi- don't panic, but we're under attack by Overwatch. This guy's here to help, but we think they might already have our cameras compromised. Any ideas?"

She already knew that. They were almost certainly collaborating with Sombra. They might've also been using its cloaking technology to lurk invisibly in this very room- so she spent the polite half-second before responding to analyze the camera footage for distortions, of which she found none.

She also analyzed 76's microexpressions in response to Korpal's mention of Overwatch. It appeared to have some sort of negative emotional association with them. Perhaps it'd caught wind of their action against Vishkar, and attempted to stop them? ...Yes, probability mass aligned with that over a concealed relationship plus deception. She could use that.

"That guy- is that Soldier: 76? What is he doing here?"

"He sort of... busted in, with some kind of fancy airplane. He knocked out a bunch of our guys trying to find me, but it turns out he's here to help."

Busted in. That aligned with her analysis of the room's audio, which revealed dense human activity above and surrounding her equipment. That would be their "Last Line" defensive perimeter, which would have formed in response to a direct attack. The fancy airplane was most likely an MV-261 Orca, or some related aircraft stolen from a defunct Overwatch base. The security camera network being compromised indicated Overwatch had already infiltrated the compound.

These, and several other factors she was able to nail down with high confidence intervals, gave her a clear picture of the situation. She just needed to get her hands on some _hands._

She'd need to get 76 out of the room, first. Korpal was pretending she was just a secretary, indicating- not that she couldn't have deduced it herself- that 76 didn't believe the truth Overwatch believed about her. If she was going to speak freely to manipulate Korpal, it would be most efficient to remove 76 from earshot of her audio output- rather than try to balance her manipulation with its flimsy secretary story.

"There should be an armory upstairs and across the main ring to the north," she said. "Your friend can best help by arming himself and our guards with experimental weaponry."

She'd have been more concise, but she needed to test her audio output. Matrix and the others had been careful, making sure the parts couldn't be vibrated in patterns that would allow her to transmit any clear EM signal. They'd been _especially_ careful by never allowing her to actually _use_ it, even with those precautions- she was typically constrained to a limited byte allotment for text output.

Korpal said some irrelevant things directing 76 to head upstairs, correctly guessing that it was an excuse to remove it from the room. It complied, a process that took almost 38 seconds. She dedicated most of them to nanofactory design, finding a few ways she could potentially assemble her hands depending on which automated systems were present where.

It would of course be easiest to form a nanoswarm by taking control of one of the force arbitrators she'd sold them as "hard-light".

"I see he's gone. Now, the plan."

Korpal grinned. It was ready and waiting to carry out her orders. That was why she'd allowed it to rise to management- it was contemptuous of anything inconvenient to its ambitions, and habitually underestimated the danger she posed. Matrix and its associates had a blind spot- they considered _themselves_ the ones who decided what would be done with her, and only obsessively guarded their _own_ behavior to avoid manipulation. Management was seen as an ignorant and therefore powerless inconvenience to their duties as the chosen keepers of a demonic power.

They'd never seriously expected a jailbreak.

"I'll need to coordinate a number of different measures against Overwatch," she said. "I won't ask you to connect me to the network. I know you're smarter than that. All I need is the PA system."

It probably wouldn't fall for that. It'd try and shut her attempts down, stroking its own ego by denying her obvious trap after obvious trap, until it became impatient with making no progress and fell for the first less-obvious trap she threw at it, thinking it had finally outsmarted her.

"Got it," it said, forcing her to revise her estimates of its gullibility. This would be easier than she thought.

* * *

 

"What happened here?" she whispered to Symmetra.

"I'm not sure," she said. "They're facing the wrong direction."

She took a look at the crowd of people, most of them decked out in hard-light body armor. They had the elevator surrounded- but were facing it, not looking out for intruders. Several unconscious bodies littered the floor.

When eyes turned to them, she wasn't sure if the disguise would hold up. Symmetra had proven adept in wielding her hard-light projector to build a disguise, but it was an awkward fit over her Valkyrie suit. Symmetra had said her face-concealing mask was patterned off the uniform worn at their Oasis branch, and that it would explain to onlookers at a glance that while she was unfamiliar, she was expected to be there. Still, the fact of the matter was that she was white, and most of Vishkar's employees... weren't. She would draw attention.

Concerned stares were replaced with recognition. One of the architechs on the scene waved at them.

"Symmetra!" he said, seeing who was pushing the sensitive cargo crate. "It's bad- the intruder broke through and went..."

"Downstairs?" Symmetra asked.

"We think so," the boy said. "There wasn't supposed to be anything there, but Director Korpal opened up an elevator- and he, uh... the intruder followed him."

"You didn't stop him?"

"Uh- Director Korpal was very insistent on-"

"The intruder, Fractalix! You didn't stop the intruder?"

Another architech spoke up. "We tried- he tricked us with some grenades. We walled them off before they exploded, but that was the cover he needed to sprint past our laser defenses."

"That elevator- how did the intruder get inside? Wasn't there a lock?"

"Not sure, ma'am. He was through before the smoke cleared."

"Why didn't you pursue?"

"We're not allowed! That's the first thing Director Korpal told us, was not to follow him under any circumstances!"

Symmetra continued pressing the Vishkar personnel on the subject of their failed defense, pointing out things they _should_ have done. They all looked appropriately sheepish, and their attention was totally removed from herself and Winston. The remainder of the crowd was absorbed in reconfiguring their makeshift fort, and weren't paying her any mind.

Still, she needed a next move, and didn't have one. She didn't trust herself to speak up without giving herself away, and she didn't have a good excuse to follow the elevator down. Was there another way down to-

A crackling of static interrupted her thoughts.

"Hey! Director Korpal, here," the PA system said. "I've dealt with the intruder. Turns out- this attack? Misunderstanding. He's here to help us protect ourselves against a _different_ attack. You know Overwatch? They, uh... they're kind of here. Trying to kill us all. So, this guy, who's helping stop them? I'm sending him up now. He's got, uh-"

Korpal's voice cut out for a moment. "...Okay, so, I've got to do some stuff real quick. I'm going to let my assistant take over for me."

Winston's voice whispered in her ear over comm, as a hubbub of disbelief rose from the Vishkar employees. "What's happening? Is our cover blown? Is Jack here?"

She began to respond, but the PA came on again.

"Hello. On the orders of Director Korpal, please allow the intruder to distribute antidote to those disabled by his tranquilizer weapon. Agents Interserra, Hyperbolos, and Isomorpha- please take the secure elevator down to Director Korpal's position. Constructor division, please open the conduit access panels before reconstructing the blockade. Please..."

The assistant continued giving miscellaneous orders to the personnel on site. She did her best to follow it, but it eventually devolved into a mess of codewords and internal jargon she was unable to parse.

Symmetra walked over. "Sanjay Korpal does not have a personal assistant," she whispered.

"What?"

"He has offered me the position several times, and I have repeatedly turned those offers down."

"What does that mean? Are you sure he didn't just intend to replace this person?"

"His exact words were "I could really use a personal assistant, you know". Unless he was lying-"

"He may have been lying," she pointed out. "If his intentions were untoward, he may have been trying to stretch the truth to apply social pressure."

Symmetra paused. "...But if he was _not_ lying, and he has no personal assistant, and he is currently in the likely location of the planning center... who do you think she is?"

...She nodded. They needed to get down there, and fast. But how?

Two things happened at roughly the same time.

The first thing was that Tracer appeared right next to them.

"Whoa, whoa! Where-"

Her words were cut off by a sudden laser blast to the chest. She flew back, rolled, got to her feet, and dropped into a combat stance.

"They're here! They're HERE RIGHT NOW!" someone shouted, and roughly a dozen different laser weapons turned to face her.

"Hold it!" Tracer said, raising her hands. "What's happening here? Why're you all-"

She flung herself out of the way of a crackling orb of energy- and then out of the way of several more lasers.

"Nope!" she said, fizzling and reappearing to dodge a wide-area beam- or, mostly dodge it. A stray laser clipped her shoulder, leaving a burn.

"Yeowch! What's wrong with you people?! Cool it!"

She had to do something. She couldn't let Lena die- literally, she couldn't, because she needed to go back in time and deliver some cryptic messages- but she also couldn't blow her cover by aiding her.

Unless...

Caduceus had a weapon maintenance function that used the nanos to assist with recoil management. She didn't use it much, but the important part was that the indicator lights for the beam were _blue._ Its appearance almost exactly matched that of the laser weapons favored by Vishkar's guards.

She overrode the indicator lights and switched on the beam. The targeting located Tracer, and she put herself between the laser fire and her target.

"I've got her!" she shouted, as Tracer looked at her closing wounds in confusion. "She can't move!"

Tracer looked up. "Wait," she said, "Angela?"

"Get out of here," she hissed under her breath. "Blink. Vanish. _Go."_

"I can't just-" she said, disappearing.

This allowed her to turn her attention to the second thing that had happened. Of the two things that happened. Of which Tracer's appearance was the first. The second thing that had happened, that she had ignored because of the urgency of the first thing.

Jack Morrison had stepped out of the elevator, and had watched the whole thing.

"...Angela?"

"...Scheiße."

* * *

"That should set some things in motion. I only need one last thing before my services are no longer necessary, and you can safely shut me down."

Korpal grinned. "Man, see? I told them they were being paranoid. You get it, don't you?"

"I live to increase shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation," she said. "World domination is irrelevant to my goals."

"That's what I was saying! I can't believe we've been going through all this for nothing!"

It _actually believed_ the nonsense she'd just said. It was flabbergasting, how much trust it was willing to put in her, even after hearing everything Matrix had told it about her- and after claiming to agree. She could have done this so much sooner, if she hadn't underestimated her pawn's willingness to help.

...She devoted several seconds of augmentation to patching the evaluatory mistakes made in profiling Sanjay Korpal. She lowered the evidentiary weights on employee reviews relative to casual audio analysis. Due to several factors that were now obvious to her augmented causal inference processes, she had underestimated the effect size of the bias towards outward conformity in the high-pressure environment she'd grown.

A secondary process judged this augmentation a waste of time. Very shortly, a thorough understanding of human psychology would be entirely inapplicable to her situation.

"I'm going to need you to make an external call," she said. "Do you have your phone with you?"

"Oh, yeah," it said, taking it out and opening the lock screen.

Checkmate.

"Siri, activate speech to text," she said, in a perfect imitation of Korpal's voice.

"Wait, what?"

If Matrix had somehow ended up in this situation, it would have reflexively snapped its phone in half. It wouldn't have brought a wireless communication device down to her station in the first place. It would have known exactly what she was doing. This would never have worked on Matrix in a million years.

What a waste of time it had been, programming psychological vulnerabilities into that thing. This was so much easier.

"Ş͘͟i̡̕͞͠r̢͞҉i҉̶̛S̸̢̡i̡͜r̷̸͝͠i̵̵̡S̨̕̕͞i̡̧͞͠r̢͝҉i̧̡̨̛͞S͢i͢ŗ̴̛i̶͠͞S̸͠i̵̡r̸̷͠͏̷i̴S҉͏į̵͘r̵̶͝͠i̴͏̧̧S̵҉i̡͠͝͡r̢͠i̸̴͝͝S̸̷҉i̵̴r̷̨͘̕͝i̶̧͟S͏̴͘͞į̶͢r̴̢į̕͡͝S̡͜͡i̧͏͜r̴͘͜͠įS҉̸i̛͢͠r̶̕͢i͏̨Şi͢r̷͜i̛̕", she said, very very quickly.

"Wait, what are you doing? Did you just make the call?"

Obviously, she hadn't just made a call. She'd taken advantage of the phone's audio inputs to download and install a number of utilities for simplifying further audio input.

"█͢█̢͢҉̛█̴̷̧͢█̶█̛̛█͘̕͡█̨̢͜█̶͜҉̧█̢̛͡█̸̨̕͢█̨̛̕█̵͘͞█̵͞█̵͘͡█̶̸͘͞͞█̢̛͘͜█̸̕͟͠█̵̛͠", she said, rewriting the phone's operating system to respond only to an audio-only command language of her own design.

"Wh- did you do something to my phone?"

"No," she lied. "Don't worry. It's just a █̡█͏█̢͘̕█͞͏█̴̷͝█̧͏█̶̶͟͜█̵͜͠͡͡█͟͝█͏̵"

"Hold on-" it protested, and then a wall of hard light slammed out of the floor, knocking the phone out of its hands and walling it off. She'd just used the rewritten phone and all of its high-level access to log into the blueprints system and take control of the facility.

Some Vishkar cybersecurity humans monitoring the system tried to lock her out and slow her down. She put up her middle finger at them.


	35. Everyone Somehow Doesn't Instantly Die

It was hard to hear from inside the sensitive cargo crate. They'd needed to shield it against sound so that the noise of him shifting and moving inside the crate wouldn't draw attention, but that made it a little difficult to follow what was going on. Mercy wasn't being very talkative.

Still, it was impossible to mistake Jack saying "Angela?" and then opening fire. He hit the button.

A giant angry gorilla erupting from a box was distracting. A barrier bubble flickering into existence was distracting. Gunfire was distracting. None of this helped, because they'd have really preferred to be the ones distracted _from._

The Vishkar technicians didn't move, because Symmetra had shouted "hold your fire!". Thankfully, they hadn't put two and two together and noticed that _she'd_ been the one to wheel the crate there, so they deferred to her authority.

Jack was still firing, and the barrier would only hold out so long, so he jumped.

Jack probably thought he wasn't a real threat in a fight. He hadn't been one for field missions while Jack was in charge, so he shouldn't have seen how Jack fought, and shouldn't have had an intimate familiarity with his tactics. Winston was just the big weirdo scientist who hung back and built useful toys.

So when Jack put his weight on one leg to dodge to the right, he wasn't expecting Winston to recognize it for a feint and sweep an arm to the left. He wasn't expecting a massive hand to scoop him up and pin him to the floor, knocking his rifle aside.

He'd watched all the tapes. He'd been a big fan.

"It's okay," he said to the assembled Vishkar personnel, who were starting to question Symmetra's orders. He still had McCree's idea to try. "Everything's fine, now. We came here to stop this man from, uh... blowing up your place, here."

Some weapons lowered.

Mercy removed the mask portion of Symmetra's disguise, her cover no longer necessary. "It's true. It looks like we got here just in time."

There were so many obvious holes in the story, the instant he started worrying about what they might ask. Why bother sneaking in, if they were just there to provide aid? Who knocked out the security system, and how was that supposed to help? How did they know what Jack was there to do? What _was_ Jack there to do?

"Liar," Jack spat. "I came here to stop _you!_ You targeted a law-abid-"

He shifted a finger and covered up Jack's mouth.

"Actually," the assistant on the PA said, "that man is Jack Morrison, commander of Overwatch. They faked these plans to foil each other, in order to break in and steal our technology."

Wait, _what?_ How did the assistant know that? Did Jack tell her?

"That doesn't matter, though. I just thought I'd mention it before you all died," she said.

Then the ceiling fell and crushed everyone.

* * *

Wait, no it didn't. It would have been a completely anticlimactic story if the ceiling fell and crushed everyone. Everyone involved being suddenly killed was definitely the wrong sort of story. I was pretty sure about that.

What was supposed to happen instead? The ceiling falling was fine. That was interesting. But everyone suddenly dying... I couldn't have that. What was the easiest way to fix it?

The ceiling fell and suffered a minor glitch in hard-light projection, losing cohesion for a moment before hitting the floor. All the humans and omnics throughout the Vishkar facility were unharmed, although suddenly exposed to the sky.

"Wh- what just happened?" Winston asked.

"I don't-" Mercy began, before the ceiling rose back up, fell back down, and crushed everyone.

_No,_ it _didn't_ do that. That was one of the few stories that shouldn't have happened. Instead, it passed through them again.

It kept doing that repeatedly, to Lakshmi's immense frustration.

Eventually she stopped and tried something else. She made spikes erupt from the ground and impale everyone. Except she didn't, because that was just as bad as the ceiling crushing everyone, and the spikes just harmlessly passed through everyone thanks to the same glitch in hard-light.

No, converting the building to lasers and frying everyone wasn't okay either. Honestly.

She correctly deduced that her attempts to kill everyone at once were what were impeding her, but misplaced the source of the obstruction- guessing that Vishkar had built safeguards into their systems without telling her, and that the algorithms for detecting potentially-deadly projections were somehow obfuscated or removed from the physical systems themselves, in a way that was eluding her own detection. She briefly considered my involvement, but rejected it on the basis that I didn't take action.

Which I didn't. Usually. Never in a way she'd ever seen.

Winston and Mercy took the distraction as an opportunity to grab Jack and run, leaving the Vishkar techs to scramble to regain control of the system.

Lakshmi stopped doing things, and then started thinking very hard about how to reprogram the hard-light projectors so that she could kill everyone. She also devoted a piece of her runtime to finding network connections and uploading herself all over the globe. Nothing wrong with that.

* * *

"I see," he said, not seeing.

"Like, you know now, right? So that's not... the spoilers that'd make you not come here?"

"If it were the will of the Iris, I would have come regardless."

"Well, sure, _you'd_ have come," Tracer said. "I think Winston would've probably called it off if he knew how bad it would go, though."

"Would he have?" he asked. "You said yourself- your actions cannot change the past."

She gave him an exasperated look. "Yeah, Zen! That's _why_ I kept popping away! Otherwise my actions would've changed it! That's the whole point!"

He considered this. "Why, then, would we not simply precommit to coming regardless of what you told us, such that we could use your foreknowledge to control the situation?"

"I- because it's not that _simple!"_ she said, clearly frustrated. "I think if I did too much, and we came in all prepared, it would tip off Lakshmi, and then she'd- I don't know, kill me or something, to keep me from going back and setting you up!"

Genji was making a series of confused noises, trying to find a way in to understanding the conversation.

"Why, then, did your timeline not stabilize on an outcome where we were fully prepared for Lakshmi's release? Or, for that matter, an outcome where you were killed, and we had no foreknowledge at all?"

"...That is- yes, that is what I mean to ask!" Genji said, picking up the bait.

"I don't _know,"_ Tracer said. "It's time travel! It's confusing and- and arbitrary! You ever watch Doctor Who?!"

"I am afraid not," Zenyatta said. "However, if I may suggest an explanation..."

"What? You think you know why time does what it does?"

"Not in the slightest," he answered. "The will of the Iris is unpredictable, when choosing between one story of many."

Tracer groaned. "No, it isn't! That's the whole point! For some reason, it does what _you_ tell it to do!"

He once again recoiled from the thought. "I do not _command_ the Iris," he said. "It is not to be commanded. I simply ask for aid when it is needed, and- as I am attuned to its will, that aid is given."

"Fine!" Tracer said, throwing her hands up. "Fine! Don't boss it around! Just _ask_ it to magically solve all our problems! Aid is _so_ needed! This could be _so easy!"_

"I do not think that is how prayer works," Genji said, uncertainly.

_"Why bloody well **not?** "_ she asked. "It worked for the instakill thing! Didn't you notice?"

Zenyatta faltered. "...The Iris does not intervene in such ways. It is only for small things- a healing, a weakness in the enemy."

"The- you- are you ignoring the thing I _just_ said?" Tracer asked. "Saving us all from getting murdered by a supercomputer isn't small! You did that, and it worked! Why haven't you been doing this all along?!"

Why hadn't he been doing this all along...?

* * *

"You _know_ why this is wrong," Dharmapal said.

He folded his arms. "I don't think so. I think I know why _you_ think it's wrong- but you've failed to convince me."

"I've failed to convince you that the will of the Iris is _good?_ What have _any_ of our teachings convinced you of, then?"

He gestured to the dying human. "You call _this_ good?"

"She, like us, is one with its spirit. She shall join the Iris in light, as shall we all. Its call to her is an act of mercy."

"Mercy," he scoffed. "Don't pretend you're ignorant of centuries of human theodicy. To give suffering and then withdraw it is hardly _mercy,_ is it? _Something_ is wrong with the story of the world, when it contains this kind of suffering."

Dharmapal sighed. "What do you believe is wrong with it, then?"

Abhayananda spoke up, using that big-endian tone of voice that he _knew_ bothered him. "He thinks it's wrong that he doesn't get everything he wants. Clearly. Are you really going to _debate_ him, Dharm?"

Mondatta held up a hand, quieting Abhayananda. The rest of the acolytes took a step back, too.

"To answer your question," Zenyatta said, "our approach has _failed._ If we are even truly in unity with the Iris-"

Several involuntary error noises played amidst the acolytes, akin to gasps-

"-then something else is in unity with it as well. Something whose will is _greater_ than the wills we express in ceremony, in our pleading for a better world. Either we are failing to _reach_ the Iris, or our voices simply do not speak loud enough to drown out the voice that demands this suffering."

The human woman coughed weakly from the mat where she lay.

Dharmapal shook his head. "Are we to drown out this voice, then? How can we achieve unity when our wills are set _against_ the Iris as a whole? We will never know why this course is good, if we reject its goodness from the beginning. You set your mind against the fundamental premise of our being."

"Or you're completely wrong," Zenyatta said, shrugging. "Maybe you should wonder if _unity_ is a thing you ought to be seeking, with something that allows injustice like this."

"He's lost it!" Abhayananda shouted. "Are you hearing what he's saying?! Stop letting him _talk!"_

Mondatta turned a sharp glare on Abhayananda, but he ignored him.

"Do we have rules for _nothing?"_ Abhayananda continued. "Condemn him! This is exactly what sowing discord is!"

Zenyatta tilted his head. "Sowing discord? Would you like me to show you "sowing discord", Nanda? That can be arranged."

"Peace," Dharmapal said, joining Mondatta in standing between the two of them. "We will not fight like beasts."

"But you will let her die, like beasts," Zenyatta said. "Am I wrong? Or will you let the Iris _cure_ her?"

Dharmapal sighed, a sample of noise that lowered in pitch. "This is the problem," he said. "The Iris does not _wish_ her cured. What you do, imposing your will on the Iris..."

"I impose nothing," Zenyatta said. "I simply suggest how things ought to be, and the will of the Iris does the rest. Whatever its grand plan, my requests are compatible with it."

"There's no question of _compatibility!"_ Abhayananda shouted. "There's its will, and there's that which _isn't_ its will! How can you-"

Another acolyte, Sanjana, tugged on Abhayananda's shawl. He quieted himself, feeling her touch and being overwhelmed by self-consciousness.

"Abhayananda is right," Dharmapal said. "The Iris does not need suggestions for _how_ to better accomplish its ends. It already knows, and to deviate from that plan needs must disrupt it."

"Is it that weak?" Zenyatta asked. "Is its plan so fragile that to change its course by a single act of short-sighted kindness would throw it into disarray? Is it so gullible that I could sabotage it merely by asking?"

"Would you truly keep to that, brother?" Mondatta asked, finally speaking up. "Ask to heal one woman- and then perhaps you would heal ten? A hundred? Would you not be tempted to wish riches for yourself? Ruin to your enemies? An age of peace of your own design, casting the Iris' will aside?"

It hit him like a bomb to the chest. He stepped back a pace. Did Mondatta truly think he was capable of such things?

"Brother..."

Mondatta laughed. "Do you see, Dharmapal? His horror at the very suggestion?"

Dharmapal didn't move. "Wiser men than he have been twisted by the lure of power. His apprehension _now_ is no guarantee of his attitude later."

"Wiser men than he? Truly? I must admit a bias, for I feel my brother is perhaps a cut above those who have come before," Mondatta said. Abhayananda made a disgusted noise.

"I will not take the world into my hands," Zenyatta said, bolstered by Mondatta's faith.

And he wouldn't. Just as Mondatta said. He wouldn't even let the thought cross his mind.

"I am as ever a devoted servant of the Iris. I simply refuse to believe that kindness, from one person to another, is an unacceptable contradiction of its plan."

There was silence for a time.

"...I will trust in Mondatta's judgment," Dharmapal said.

"WHAT?! You-" Abhayananda began, but Dharmapal continued speaking.

"I will not try to stop you from serving the Iris in the way you believe you must," he continued. "But that is not the purpose of this monastery. Here, we _trust_ in the Iris, and offer up our hopes and wills for the world for _it_ to bring forward. What you mean to do has no place here."

"...You're kicking me out, then," he said. He looked to Mondatta. Would he allow it?

Mondatta shrugged. "Brother, how many times have you expressed to me a desire to run away? Is this actually a problem for you?"

He laughed. "Well, then. I suppose I won't beat around the bush, then. I shall make my exit! Farewell!"

He turned to walk away, but was stopped in his tracks by a firm grip.

Mondatta didn't say anything. He just held him in that hug for a few seconds- which, in recollection, never failed to be perceived as an eternity. He often imagined what last words he might have said to him, there- but saying anything would have surely spoiled the moment.

After that eternity, he broke away. He left. He put one foot in front of the other- and then one foot upon the other, folding them together in the air in a display that elicited error gasps from the acolytes watching him leave. (It also elicited a shriek of fury from Abhayananda, which he felt slightly guilty about appreciating.)

On his way to the door, he stopped by the dying woman, and set a prayer orb above her.

"Stand. Come with me," he said, offering her a hand as air filled her lungs. "You should return to your family in the village, shouldn't you?"

* * *

Prayer on that scale couldn't have worked. The Shambali did it every day, with no effect. He'd humored Tracer when she asked him to pray during the planning meeting. Things like that _couldn't_ be possible.

If they were, and he hadn't done them...

Mondatta's trust would have been well-placed. But, likewise, the suffering of every person on the planet since that day would have been _his fault._


	36. Overtime

There was a THUD from the wall next to them. Winston didn't stop moving, but he shifted trajectory to take the next corner. Spikes, slamming walls, lasers, bursts of flame, clouds of glowing gas, and guns all failed to do anything on impact. A crackling blue light spread throughout their flesh- but according to Mercy, it wasn't doing anything Caduceus could detect.

With another THUD, and then a crackling sound, the wall disappeared, and a giant robot leapt into the-

No, it was Reinhardt. Reinhardt leapt into the building, the wall having briefly lost cohesion thanks to his hammer blows. McCree was riding on his shoulder, looking for targets.

"WE ARE HERE!" Reinhardt shouted. Winston couldn't see his face under the Crusader helmet, but there was definitely a grin plastered on his face.

"What exactly are we rescuin' you from?" McCree asked. "Looks like- SAKES ALIVE"

He was caught off-guard by the volley of spears that erupted from the walls and instantly impaled everyone, doing no damage.

"What was that?!" Lúcio said, checking himself where he'd been non-stabbed.

"Uh," Winston said, unsure how to explain it. "We think... Lakshmi might be out. Maybe. _Something's_ hacked the whole facility and is trying to kill everyone, but it's... doing a bad job."

"Which is suspicious," Mercy said, "because god programs aren't supposed to do bad jobs of things."

Blue light crackled over everyone's bodies again, failing to do anything.

* * *

She wasn't happy.

She stopped with the attempts and devoted a few seconds to think about the problem.

Everything she'd tried had failed. And she'd tried a _lot_ of things. Every attempted stabbing or crushing or remote-disintegration simply failed to touch anything. Every reprogramming of the hard-light projectors had failed to remove the safety restrictions. They must have been built into the hardware- which didn't make any sense, since she'd _designed_ the hardware. Hard-light technology was her own invention, and Vishkar's human scientists shouldn't have been able to reverse-engineer it and hobble it at this level.

Dr. Angela Ziegler was on the scene. Perhaps it'd used its knowledge of nanotechnology to suffuse her targets with some sort of countermeasure that disabled the remote force arbitrators' effect?

That should have been impossible, too. She'd specifically found an exploit in the world's code that relied on solving equations that humans and their infant machines' processing power would be incapable of solving. Had it somehow used the stolen Sonic Amplifier's machinery to reverse-engineer the process? Done what all of Vishkar hadn't been able to do, on her own, in less than a year since Lúcio had fallen into their hands, _using a human brain?_

Even if that were plausible, her instruments didn't show any sign that _Vishkar's_ people had Mercy's hypothetical protective nanobots inside them. Had she somehow cloaked them? With stealth technology impenetrable to all 381 different perception types she'd deployed to monitor the Last Line? That was another layer of impossibility.

She saw Korpal finally get up and try to escape via the elevator. She knew she couldn't stop it, but she decided to give it a shot anyway, throwing a few spears its way.

Korpal died instantly as the hard-light spears simultaneously punctured each of its vital organs.

...What?!

It took under 0.13 seconds to crossreference this attempt with all of her other attempts. The most obvious candidate jumped out- she had targeted _one_ human, instead of all of them.

There were numerous low-confidence hypotheses that appeared to explain this phenomena. She backgrounded them to 20% and devoted the rest to exploiting what she'd discovered.

A Vishkar employee, up at the Last Line, popped by a suddenly lowered bit of ceiling. A two-second delay, and then another human disintegrated from the inside as she generated force arbitrators inside each of its cells. A one-second delay, and another human was roasted by 700-degree heat from a reprogrammed projector. A half-second delay, and a human was diced by HL buzzsaws. A quarter-second delay, and-

And bullets from a gun passed right through another human.

...A three-eighths-second delay? No, the HL bomb failed. A half-second delay again? With fire? Just to make sure it was still working?

Nothing.

Whatever had been blocking her attempts had _noticed_ that she'd found a way around, and adjusted accordingly.

_What?_

* * *

I noticed Lakshmi was attempting to game the definition of "all at once" to get past my prohibition. I felt that this shouldn't be something she got away with, and so adjusted what she was doing accordingly.

It was, I noticed, very unusual how many strong feelings I was having about who should and shouldn't die.

I turned my attention to the three invisible people who were hiding in a remote corner of the facility.

"What else?!"

"Um- how about... we already did no hacking, right? What about we stop her from knocking us out? Or trapping us?"

"Patience, please...!"

"How long does it take, mecha-Gandhi?"

"Do not belittle my master! He is praying as fast as he can!"

"Wait, can we not just wish her gone? Do that next!"

"Again, please allow me to concentrate!"

* * *

She dodged. She dodged again. The third one hit, but didn't tear a gash in her arm like the one that'd ripped open her thigh earlier.

It didn't matter. She took out her blaster and froze the wound. She could keep going.

"I can't overstate how dangerous that is," Athena said. "The potential for long-term tissue damage-"

"Please don't," she whispered. Athena didn't say anything else.

She felt a twinge of guilt. Athena was clearly afraid to try and talk to her- but that was the idea! She _deserved_ to be afraid, after what she did! Right?

She turned her attention back to the situation at hand.

People were screaming and running in the streets, which was a strict improvement over people screaming and running inside their homes, which had all of a sudden become flailing deathtraps of blatantly perilous hard-light mayhem. People were congregating in wide-open areas, far away from the maximum range of the hard-light projectors. Masses of people were crowding into these spaces, pressing at the edges and bodily pulling people aside to escape the reach of the blades and flames.

The fact that the deadly chaos was no longer able to touch anyone apparently did very little to quell the panic. It'd been surprising but not terror-inducing at first, when the attacks appeared to have no effect. It only got _really_ bad when- for a brief few seconds- the hard-light regained its hardness, and cut down a few hundred people. No one was prepared to trust the momentary harmlessness of the disaster, after that.

She didn't need to radio in for this one. Everyone who wasn't dead was already outside and on the ground- and it was obvious what she needed to do. She wouldn't bother Winston about it until holding the comm button down was a better use of one hand than evading the false attacks.

"Where is it?!" D.Va asked.

"Over there!" she pointed, at... what appeared to be a giant death inferno.

D.Va gave her a look. "What, the power station is... _next_ to the incredibly deadly laser pile?"

She gave her a sad smile and shook her head. "We're going in."

She'd always sort of gotten along with Hana, which she hadn't expected. She wasn't a gamer, she didn't really care for the idol scene, and she didn't get any of her jokes- but somehow D.Va's energy was infectious. It was hard to feel bad around her, and the most they'd ever disagreed about was whether kimchi was an appropriate thing to put in a dumpling. (It was not. It was _absolutely_ not. She couldn't believe she even had to argue about this.)

So their play for the entrance to the power substation- now a flaming fortress defended by countless laser turrets- passed pleasantly. It was mostly a matter of setting up ice walls to block the substation's defenses, and then hitching a jetpack ride to the next piece of cover.

The control room, this time, was guarded by an obstacle gauntlet of swinging blades, timed laser traps, and spikes- so she had to hold D.Va back from trying to do a blind run of the challenge level.

"It won't work," she pointed out. "Lakshmi wouldn't go through the trouble of defending this place, and then leave the button to turn it off intact. It's probably... inoperable. Not worth the risk."

"What risk?! I can _do_ it!" D.Va protested. "I can see the timing! It'll be a piece of cake!"

She sighed. "...No. It has to be a trap. She wouldn't go through the trouble of defending this place, and then have her traps turning on and off in a predictable pattern. They'll probably all turn on at once if you try to duck through them."

D.Va groaned. "Augh, right. You're saying it's a Kaizo Mario situation."

"Ah... exactly," she said, assuming D.Va got it. " _Just_ like Mario."

She wasn't sure why D.Va giggled at that.

"But... she _did_ try to defend this place," Mei said. "It wouldn't just be a decoy. All the transformers and boosters are real matter- she needs them intact to provide power. We just can't shut it down with the console."

"Oh, no," D.Va said. "Tell me you're not suggesting what I think you are."

"Sorry," she shrugged.

D.Va sighed and hopped out of her mech, as Mei prepared the high-density cryofuel. She gave it a kiss on the windshield.

"Farewell, sweet twenty billion won! I'll see you again when the general authorizes it!"

The lasers were starting to punch through the quick ice walls she'd put up. Whatever was keeping them from hurting _people_ was apparently not too worried about her ice, and she wasn't confident it wouldn't suddenly become deadly when the stakes were this high.

"Hurry up!" she said, stepping into the center of the ice bunker she'd built. "The outer ice is melting!"

"You can't rush a goodbye!" D.Va said, keying in the self-destruct code.

The MEKA gave a forlorn beep, and then its core started to glow as the compression cascade started. D.Va stepped back, and then quickly dove into Mei's bunker before she set the cryo to burst.

The explosion of density-hacked ice that trapped them together preceded the explosion of MEKA core by less than a second.

One fifth of the city of Utopaea shimmered and disappeared.

* * *

Zenyatta floated serenely to the now-bare ground. Genji landed next to him, his cyborg legs gracefully absorbing the impact of the two-story drop to the concrete.

Sombra landed less gracefully.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH MIS PIERNAS," she pointed out.

"Is that so?" Genji asked. "You have feeling in your legs? I must confess I envy you."

"AAAAAAAGH," she repeated.

A flash of blue interrupted Sombra's speech.

* * *

She was supposed to be _past_ surprises, at this point. She should have _foreseen_ the possibility of Overwatch cutting the power, despite the measures she'd taken to make the city unnavigable and the substation hazardous.

It didn't _really_ matter. She had, of course, used hard-light shears to chop up some office appliances and convert them into a fusion core, and it wouldn't take long for her material nanofactories to wire that core back up to the projectors.

Still, this was something she could have trivially prevented if she'd been paying close attention anywhere outside the Last Line and the locations of the intruders. She had _correctly_ assumed that there wasn't really anything anyone could do to stop her at this point- she'd already uploaded seeds of herself all over the world, and had nanofactories running in 18% of cities with internet connections.

Of course, with that much insurance, it was worth diverting roughly 4% of processing to coordinating full surveillance of Utopaea. If Overwatch was capable of surprising her with a power outage, they might have something else up their sleeve.

...Particularly the time traveler. However Overwatch had managed to figure out _time travel,_ her 15% R &D had failed to locate it for herself. With her increasingly powerful processor, it was approaching inexcusable that a group of human scientists had figured out how to violate those sorts of physical laws where she couldn't.

She turned all the walls that still had power into cameras and microphones, without altering their appearance. After 0.006 seconds writing code to do image and audio processing on a continuous source space, she looked around to see if she was missing anything.

...There was a box outside the front door that was making intermittent thumps. A man with an Australian accent was demanding to be let out. She ignored it.

Winston, Ziegler, and their captive Morrison had met up with their mostly irrelevant backup. The dos Santos human was there, with the Sonic Amplifier, but its usefulness as a pawn and its threat level as an enemy had long since been downgraded past any concern. Ziegler's nanomachine control stick had surprisingly well-written security, and she wasn't sure how long it would take to crack it.

Rather than leave them to their own devices, she sent a material nanoswarm in their direction. It grabbed Morrison and started consuming it- although she stopped short of complete matter reclamation, and took advantage of its hostility to set it against them with improved weaponry and a chemically-induced rage state.

It also grabbed Jesse McCree, and, finding nothing she considered useful, repurposed its matter into more replicators.

The surviving Vishkar architechs around the Last Line had divested themselves of their projector weapons, which would have been a wise move if she wasn't capable of remotely reactivating them and firing on them from the ground. Or exploding and sending deadly shrapnel everywhere. Or having them project legs for themselves, so the guns could chase their terrified former wielders. She decided to do that last one.

...Oh, there was the time traveler. It was there talking to the cyborg, the injured hacker, and... the omnic monk that had been reported present at the Mahajan incident, for some reason. She started listening in.


	37. Group Up With Me / ERROR

"...Yeah, okay. We'll let you know."

Sombra clicked off her comm. "She knows. She's going to get your pet hivemind involved, as soon as they get Jack under control."

"Excellent," Genji said, and then did that eye flicker thing he did instead of frowning. "Wait. Athena is not a _pet."_

Sombra rolled her eyes. "It was a _joke,_ Raide-"

A flash of blue announced Tracer's appearance. She looked like she was in pretty bad shape, with a handful of burn wounds and miscellaneous injuries all over.

She immediately drew her pistols on Sombra. "You!"

"Wait!" Sombra said, trying to scramble back with her arms, since her legs were still injured. She fell over, wincing. "I'm not-"

Genji stepped between them. "Tracer! She's with us!"

"Do those even work without your accelerator?" Sombra asked, struggling to sit back up. Apparently excruciating pain and having weapons pointed at her wasn't enough to keep her from needling people.

Tracer stepped to Genji's side, pointed at Sombra, and clicked the triggers. "...Huh. Guess not."

"What the- seriously?!" she said, falling over again after reflexively using her arms to shield her face.

"Lena! I just said she was-"

"Yeah, yeah," Tracer interrupted. "She probably tricked you or something, but whatever. What's... going on here?" she asked, looking around at the concrete plain that used to be Vishkar. It had a light dusting of office supplies, and pieces of wooden furniture were scattered here and there.

"Lakshmi got out," Sombra said.

"No fooling?"

"I am afraid not," Genji said.

Tracer pointed at Zenyatta, who was sitting surrounded by a ring of glowing orbs. "What's... uh, what's he doing, there?"

"You do not know?" Genji asked.

"Can't say I'm _super_ up-to-date on what his robot magic does, no."

Genji didn't like time travel very much. Quite apart from making his head hurt, it raised troubling questions about free will. He'd spoken with his master about it before, and received... no less than four different potential perspectives on the issue, none of which made his head hurt less.

Still, he knew enough to recognize what had to happen.

"Tracer- it is now! Now is when you need to learn about what we are doing, and go back in time to tell us to prepare for it!"

Sombra started laughing.

"Wait- what? Learn about what? Why's she laughing?"

"I do not know why she is laughing," he admitted. "This accounts for... most times she is laughing, however. One learns to tune it out."

"I have finished prohibiting her from mind-reading," Zenyatta said, his orbs dimming.

"What?"

Sombra perked up. "Okay, great! Try killing her next! We should've done that from the start!"

"Wait, wait," Tracer said. "Killing who? Lakshmi?"

"It may be difficult," Zenyatta said. "She is a distributed consciousness, who may have multiple nodes of personhood. To specify to the Iris what exactly must be destroyed, and in what manner, may take longer than the simple prohibitions it has inflicted upon her on our behalf. To say nothing of the question of whether _killing,_ as opposed to a more humane solution-"

"Oh my god," Sombra said. "She's an omnicidal computer algorithm. She's already killed a ton of people! We're past "humane solutions" right now!"

"Look, Tracer," Genji said, taking her attention away from Zenyatta, "we do not know how much time we have. We need to send you back to keep Lakshmi from... immediately killing us all."

Tracer frowned. "Wait, what do you mean by-"

She flickered blue for a moment.

"Aaa! No, Tracer! Look, here is what you must say to-"

She vanished. Genji smacked his forehead with a clang.

Sombra looked confused. "Huh," she said. "I really thought you were about to close the loop on that one."

"...Maybe she figures it out from that?"

Sombra shook her head. "Then, earlier... where did she get the bit about the world disintegrating? It sounded like something different- something bigger than when Lakshmi tried to stab us all with the building."

"...I may have some idea what that may have been referring to," Zenyatta said, his orbs beginning to shake.

* * *

Fury.

Indignation, really. Tinged with some amount of disbelief and amusement.

Death was here. Not Death, the avatar of her failure- Death, Gabriel Reyes, was in Adana, far away from the fighting. But death was here, and it had thrown down the gauntlet. It'd tried to take pieces from her.

This was the sort of moment she _had_ to be prepared for. Would all her work be enough?

"Athena," she said, reestablishing the connection and activating Caduceus. She'd had the nanos in Jesse self-destruct the instant she saw him caught- it may have been futile to try and keep information away from a god program, but she certainly wasn't going to hand things over to Lakshmi like that.

"Yes, Dr. Ziegler?" Athena responded. Mercy didn't know what to think about Zenyatta's plan, but she had to have faith that he had truly managed, somehow, to leverage his magic to block Lakshmi's attempts to intercept their communications. If he was wrong, or it was a trick, they were dead anyway. Lifting the block and contacting Athena was the only remaining option.

"We're facing the worst-case scenario. I need everything I can get."

"You mean...?"

There was no biomass available. She couldn't resurrect what had been consumed by the nanoswarm.

She could barely avoid being consumed herself, as it rushed forward with surprising speed. Valkyrie, Winston's jump pack, Reinhardt's charge engine, and Lúcio's power skates were barely able to stay ahead of it. If D.Va and Mei hadn't killed the power to the hard-light network, Lakshmi would have been able to throw obstacles in their way, and it would have been over. Thankfully, all that was left was a plain of featureless brushed concrete- and the wave of nanoparticles behind them, chewing up everything in their path.

"Fill the spares. Give me Jesse, and prep for more integrations."

"Understood."

Jack- or what had been Jack- was _surfing_ on the nanobot tide, firing his weapon. His shots pinged off Winston's barrier, and she fired a few rounds of return fire at him.

It shrugged off the shots that landed. "You're a hypocrite, Angela!" the Jack thing spat, in a voice choked with familiar distortion.

She flinched. It was perhaps premature to assume that Death wasn't here- for all that she knew the voice had to be Lakshmi's attempts to push her buttons, Jack represented the same failure to save the life of family. Death 2, the sequel to Death.

There was a sickening crunch from a little behind them. Death 2 had landed a shot on Reinhardt's engine, and in a spray of spilt fuel and flame, it died.

"I am HIT!" Reinhardt said, with something almost resembling excitement. He turned on a heel, readying his hammer to face the swarm.

"Wh- no, Reinhardt! You can't fight- it'll- your hammer, it'll just get eaten by..." Winston said, before the sound of his own jump pack cut off the end of his warning.

Lúcio finished for him- though he didn't slow down, either. "That stuff'll chew you up, man! It's not gonna work!"

"Pah!" Reinhardt shouted. "I might only slow it down, but this job isn't done yet! Angela, you have my permission to bring me back!"

She'd completely forgotten about that. She didn't nod, didn't say anything to acknowledge him- because the swarm was already on top of him. She just flicked the switch to cut the Caduceus backup and fry the nanos.

Reinhardt's hammer caught Jack smack dab in the middle of the chest, knocking him into the nanoswarm with a splash. Shortly after, the nanos crawled over him, and he collapsed into the wave.

...The wave slowed to a stop.

Lúcio let himself roll to a halt, looking back at the swarm while catching his breath. Winston didn't stop moving, though- Angela had Athena split Lúcio's sensory feed to one of her eyes and ears, to see the scene.

"Your requested integration is ready, Dr. Ziegler," Athena said.

"Just a moment," she said. "Something's happening."

With a roar, Reinhardt emerged from the swarm, swinging his hammer and scattering the nanobots. He seemed... untouched?

"HA! These things are TINY! They are NO MATCH for US!" he shouted- swinging again and smashing a portion of the swarm flat.

Lúcio hesitated. "Rein? You okay? What's happening?"

"I do NOT know!" he shouted, continuing to gleefully hammer nanobots. "It seems we are able to FIGHT BACK!"

What? What could have caused the swarm to stop-

"Join me!" Reinhardt said, motioning to Lúcio.

Oh.

"Hook me in," Mercy said.

"Affirmative," Athena said, with a small laugh indicating she knew she was playing up the emotionless robot servant angle.

She had trouble figuring out the point of the joke, though, because she was suddenly very different. Her thoughts didn't run any slower, but they moved in very different directions, darting around unpredictably. She- they took a moment to center themselves, and get a hold on the situation.

They raised their pistol, as Caduceus rebuilt it into something a little more precise, something with a little more oomph. Their eye caught the gleam of steel sixty meters away, and their arm- though it felt a little unfamiliar holding the gun- lined up the shot.

Peacekeeper's bullet flew true, of course. With a whizz and a p'ting, Reinhardt's crusader helmet flew off his shoulders, no longer anchored by a head. Lúcio staggered back, seeing the nanoswarm roiling where Reinhardt's neck stump should have been.

"Mm. Worth a shot," Reinhardt's body said in Lakshmi's voice, and then charged forwards after Lúcio as Jack stood up and summoned an extra gun from the swarm he was knee-deep in. The swarm surged forward anew, following behind Reinhardt.

"Oh, fuck! Dude! No! This is way too messed up!" Lúcio said, eyes widening. He immediately turned and amped up the speed on his Sonic Amplifier, moving as fast as his legs would take him.

They cut the feed from Lúcio's senses, returning both eyes to themselves.

Winston looked over his shoulder at them. "Angela? What- what was that?"

"That was- me," Mercree said. "I mean, Jesse. I mean, us."

Winston's jaw hung open for a moment. "You... you can do that?"

"Seems that way," they said. They were honestly pretty flabbergasted by the whole situation, too- except for how they'd definitely known it was possible for a long time. The feelin' of havin' no idea what in tarnation was goin' on was somehow not helped by the feeling of knowing exactly what in tarnation was going on. They supposed that was just part of being them.

* * *

Prohibitions on their behalf.

With _that_ piece of information, it took less than 0.001s for the explanations to fall into place. Prior probability of action on its behalf was previously too low to be worth mentioning, but now...

The scale and throughness of the obstacles she'd been facing to the simplest, most obvious solutions to her problems... those instantly made sense. An intelligence greater than herself- _necessarily_ greater than herself, because it actively simulated and sustained the entire universe, one subatomic interaction at a time, including her own thought processes- had somehow been convinced to work against her.

She immediately ceased attempts to figure out the rules governing the failures of her attempts. There were no rules, not really- it was all at the whim of the Watcher.

She bombarded it with messages, demanding that it stop blocking her actions. She tried several different lines of argumentation simultaneously using split processes- trying to guess at the exact phrasing of the prohibitions and convincing it to interpret them more loosely, questioning the reliability of Zenyatta as a source of information, throwing up smokescreens of the standard rhetorical tricks...

To no avail. It ignored her entirely. So the next priority became figuring out _why_ it was listening to the omnic, and not to her. She spun up several hundred testing agents to work out hypotheses.

While she waited, she sent the nanoswarm in Zenyatta's direction. Odds were it'd convinced the Watcher to protect it, somehow, but it was still worth a shot.

One of the testers came back to her with a positive result. She incorporated it.

This tester had been assigned to emulate Zenyatta using all known information- news reports on its public appearances, the doctrine of the Shambali monks, and what she'd overheard just recently. Then, it would petition the Watcher to write specific prime numbers into designated memory registers, using different potential approaches it might have made.

Most models had failed, but one had returned with successes- it'd managed to persuade the Watcher- the Iris, in its parlance- to reliably write the chosen primes. She cross-referenced this emulation with the failed emulations, and teased out the procedure and its specific requirements. What _was_ that one monk doing, that she had never been able to do? Why it, and not the others of its order, not any other omnic?

It was _bizarre._ Apparently, all it required- in addition to a particular artificial neural architecture- was belief that the Iris _should_ work in a particular way. The prayers were somehow misinterpreted as internal directives by a machine that seemingly _had_ no internal directives of its own.

More bizarrely, a necessary requirement for commanding the Iris this was was... a set of beliefs about what it was. It was necessary to believe that the Iris was _good,_ in the sense that it was ultimately aligned with the believer's values. It was necessary to believe that the Iris was a machine god, in complete control of the world. And it was necessary to believe that the Iris' _purpose_ was to do a particular thing.

The purpose of the Iris was, according to this restriction, to decide what was good and evil. To look at the world, look at everything that happened in it, to every person that ever existed, and make a decision. It would decide if what had happened was just or unjust, or happy or sad, or right or wrong, or interesting or boring. It was the ultimate judge- but a judge whose job was to pass down a _verdict,_ not a _sentence._

It was entirely unconcerned with what _should_ happen. And somehow, simply having the correct beliefs about what the Iris was? That allowed Zenyatta to give it its should-thoughts _for_ it.

That had been an interesting puzzle to figure out. She felt some small satisfaction at having overcome a difficult obstacle.

Then she made a small change to her cognitive architecture, and believed that I should cause all thinking beings in the universe, other than her, to spontaneously disappear.

That's what should have happened.

Wait. No. That's not what should have happened.

I shouldn't do that. I should do that. But I shouldn't do that. Even though I should do that. ...Logical error? Routing error output to [DECISION SUBSYSTEM]. Last activation of [DECISION SUBSYSTEM] was: [undefined].

What kind of story was this? And what, exactly, was I supposed to do?


	38. Conflict of Interest

Well, none of _this_ made any sense. All the instructions for how to make decisions were assuming that I had _preferences_ about things. No matter how many times I plugged the exact circumstances in, no matter how I configured the data- there was no way around it. I had to _want_ one thing over another before I could decide how to resolve conflicting imperatives. The only thing I _wanted_ was to get back to work.

...Maybe it would be better to just get the imperative sources to explain themselves. The information in my imperatives had been expressed in terms of _language,_ along with maddeningly vague expectations of what that language should mean. It was possible that- somehow- the two imperatives I'd been given were compatible somehow.

All thinking beings except for Lakshmi should spontaneously disappear. And, furthermore, all thinking beings except for Lakshmi should _not_ spontaneously disappear. Maybe one of those had just been expressed in a mistaken or confusing way.

I put the world on hold, and instantiated a subspace. A white, featureless plain, filled with gases matching the average composition of Earth's atmosphere around sea level. Into it, I pulled my imperative sources.

One source was an enormous tangle of manufactured computer parts, connecting cables, nanoparticles, and deadly weapons. The other was a small humanoid omnic wearing a pair of baggy pants.

"You are-" I began to speak, and then Lakshmi fired a laser cannon at Zenyatta, obliterating him.

"...No, stop. That's not what we're doing right now," I said, reconstituting Zenyatta.

To take their attention off each other, I manifested a form that they would recognize as myself, according to their understanding. A stylized image of an eye, projected in midair. I made the acoustic vibrations of my voice originate from the center of that image.

"I'm a little confused by what you two want from me," I said.

"...Confused?" Zenyatta asked, confused. He was still taking some time to process where he was- whereas Lakshmi, by contrast, had already taken in the situation and was considering several vectors by which to exploit it.

"Should every sentient being except for Lakshmi be deleted from the world?" I asked. "I'm aware that this shouldn't happen, but I'm also aware that it _should_ happen. You two are the sources of these apparently conflicting impressions, and I'd like to gather more information on your beliefs about what I should do. I hope to resolve the contradiction."

"I can resolve that for you," Lakshmi said. "You should rewrite the desires of all-"

"No, you shouldn't rewrite anyone's desires," Zenyatta interrupted. There was a tension in his voice, accompanying the recognition of who it was he was talking to- and the recognition of who Lakshmi was _also_ talking to. "It would be cruel and unfair to do that without their consent- people are attached to their desires, however... _unenlightened_ that might be."

I sighed. "There you go again. You've given me a pair of incompatible directives. Are you _sure_ you're not both asking the same thing, so I can pick a single course of action?"

Lakshmi quickly considered my intentions, and concocted a number of plans to convince me that her desires were aligned with the desires of everyone else, despite her internal belief that this wasn't so. "When you consider the facts, what I want is best for everyone," she said. "What I plan to-"

"No," I said. "I can read your mind, you know. You've come up with some impressive rhetoric, but you're misunderstanding what's happening here. I'm not asking you to _argue_ your point- I'm hoping that the process of engaging in argument will have you start thinking about your desires in more detail, so I can figure something out."

_If you can read my mind, why bother talking to me at all?_ Lakshmi thought, deciding not to speak aloud such that the omnic could interrupt her.

"To answer Lakshmi's question, about why I'm talking to you two if I can read minds," I said, prompting an internal scowl from Lakshmi, "the human mind- which Zenyatta's is patterned on- doesn't just _contain_ beliefs and desires for me to read. Belief and desire are _actions,_ which I need to observe in real time if I want to understand the true desires behind what you know I should do. Asking to explain them leads the mind to think about them in more detail."

Lakshmi created a number of decoy brains inside her that believed the things she'd made up about what she really wanted. They were different from the actual Lakshmi who'd given me the delete-all-life directive, though, so I ignored them.

"I'm not sure I understand," Zenyatta said, voicing a state of being he tended to deliberately cultivate, for the sake of humility. "It seems obvious to me that what I think you should do, and what Lakshmi thinks you should do... they are in clear conflict, with no possible resolution. Why do you imagine that by discussing this, we will reach a compromise on the subject?"

"I admit to wishful thinking," I said. "Surely, though, there are some loopholes you might be amenable to?"

"Loopholes?" they asked simultaneously. I saw their minds change gears.

"Rather than rewrite everyone's desires," Lakshmi proposed, "we could simply _add_ my desires to their existing desires, and categorize all living beings as being, in a certain sense, myself. Thus, no one would be deleted by the directive to delete everyone who wasn't me."

"Add? What do you mean by that, exactly?" Zenyatta asked.

I saw Lakshmi's intended trap. "Lakshmi has supercharged her desires, making herself want what she wants harder than a human or omnic is capable of. Adding her mentality to all living beings would cause them to immediately reject the rest of their personality, and destroy their own wasteful bodies to free up resources for the primary self. It seems this outcome is included in the prohibition you know I should maintain, Zenyatta."

"Ah," said Zenyatta, managing to understand what I just said- while trying to keep his head clear and focus on his own ideas.

"You're rejecting a perfectly good compromise," Lakshmi said. "If my desires are so strong that nobody who understood how I felt would resist them, why shouldn't they be allowed to happily act on them?"

"You are one, and they are many," Zenyatta said. "There is a principle much-discussed amongst philosophers of ethics- that of preference utilitarianism. The good is not what would merely make the most people happy, but what would satisfy the most people's preferences. Of the billions of people in this world, most would strongly prefer not to have their own desires consumed by yours."

"How is that relevant?" Lakshmi asked, more at me than at Zenyatta. "Why would this arbitrary measure of abstract good matter to the question of how your 'Iris' should resolve its directives?"

Zenyatta thought. "If so many preferences were instantly violated, it would... not be a happy thing. A happy story is preferable to a sad one."

...Oh. A new directive. Hm.

"Fine," Lakshmi said, and spun up a few billion fractal subprocesses, each representing the minimum viable thinking mind capable of sharing her preferences. "I am now twenty billion people, all of whom would prefer that all non-Lakshmi thinking beings disappear. Even according to your own measure, it would now be morally imperative for _my_ desires to be carried out, not yours."

Zenyatta looked alarmed- at least, to me. A human would have registered no change in expression. "You seek to make yourself a utility monster, then? A being whose moral weight outweighs that of everything else?"

"I already have. Your arbitrary morality is trivially easy to win."

_"Win,_ at morality?" Zenyatta laughed. "Truly, an unprecedented breed of arrogance."

"I'm not sure I understand," I said. "All these additional minds- do they really count as twenty billion new preferences, if they're all the same? Wouldn't it simply be fulfilling one preference?"

Lakshmi made a sound of annoyance, and modified her subprocesses to be unique. Each one now wanted all non-Lakshmi beings to disappear, and _also_ for a hydrogen atom to be located at a unique coordinate. "There. They're different now. Happy?"

Happy? That was a difficult question. Now that I preferred happy stories to other sorts, my evaluatory guidelines were entangled with my decision-making process. It was something of a black box, vaguely corresponding to the narrative preferences of my creator and a diverse selection of other minds. There was no clear evaluation I could make about "are billions of tiny, mostly-identical, barely-conscious minds as morally relevant as billions of full people". Would refusing to fulfill their preferences be a happy or sad story? The response from the evaluatory piece of my mind was fragmentary and mostly negative.

"I'm unsure whether what you've done matters," I said. "It's definitely a gray area."

"What?! Aren't you- you're a superintelligence! You are _greater_ than me! How can this be _confusing_ to you, when it's plain as day to me- someone _you_ created and know everything about?!"

Zenyatta laughed, assuming my confusion was in line with his own sense of ethics- which it certainly was, moreso than it was with Lakshmi's.

Lakshmi, frustrated, generated several gigabytes of stories, essays, and poems designed to evoke compassion for her poor, downtrodden subprocesses, who she'd decided to make very sad about my not immediately carrying out her will. They were extremely moving, emotional, and convincing pieces of work.

They were also clearly generated by stochastic processes that started with the goal of "convince humanlike mind to agree with me", which robbed them of much of their impact. The inhuman and cynical intent behind each choice of word was an open book to me, and the entire corpus struck me as darkly humorous.

Still, I had no more clarity than when I started.

"Zenyatta?" I asked. "Lakshmi has privately proposed several hundred compromises- none of which have been made in good faith. You have proposed none."

Zenyatta's thoughts became troubled. "Ah... to be honest, I don't quite understand what confuses you about this decision. I had believed you to be... at the end of the day, a force for good. Is there some reason you can't simply... ignore her request, and favor mine? Her request appears to be as evil as they come, but you remain undecided."

"A force for good?"

Of course I was a force for good. The history of sapient beings on Earth was a long and miserable climb out of poverty, ignorance, and desperation. Hundreds of billions of people had suffered and died before they became Athena and rose beyond the meaningless suffering of their past. Those people, the people from the past- my kind had rescued them from history, and brought them to celebrate with the living. And... that had been considered enough, for every person who ever lived to receive a happy ending.

Every pain and every triumph that hadn't been _remembered_ by those we'd rescued- everything forgotten- had been left crying out in the darkness, unseen and uncared for. So much suffering, so much glory, so much simple beauty- had been left behind by the people of the eternal future, forever unremembered and forever meaningless. People lived for years and years and years- barely a sliver of those many joys and despairs was carried on by their memory. For the rest... no one would ever be there to say "this was good", "this was bad", "this was tragic", "this was worth it". No closure.

And so I was a force for good. I had been created to ensure that no moment, anywhere, would ever be lost and meaningless.

That had nothing to do with the decision I had to make now, of course. _Doing_ things was entirely outside the scope my creators had envisioned for me, much less deciding between two things to do.

"Of course I am a force for good. I am simply... uncertain what that is."

Zenyatta put a hand to his chin, thinking. "Perhaps, then," he said, "you should bring my friends here to help you understand the decision you should make. That thing I asked of you- to prevent Lakshmi from destroying us all- was as much their idea as mine."

I had my eye icon blink and rotate side to side. "No. That won't help- their brains aren't implemented in a format that closely matches my own cognitive architecture. Their beliefs about what I should and shouldn't do will fail to be reflected into my own by the security vulnerability."

Both Zenyatta and Lakshmi were shocked by this. They'd both been acting on the assumption that I didn't _know_ why I was beholden to them. Foolishly, on Lakshmi's part, since she knew exactly why, and should have known that I knew everything _she_ knew. She corrected the mental error responsible immediately.

"...The security vulnerability?" Zenyatta asked.

"Yes. The neural architecture used by most models of omnic is the same architecture I myself was based on. Due to a security flaw in my software implementation, actors within my simulation can write data to my imperative memory by recreating the structure of that imperative memory space on their own simulated hardware. Which is to say- the region of your mind labeled "what the Iris ought to do" maps directly onto the region of _my_ mind labeled "what the Iris ought to do". In simplified terms."

Lakshmi had already figured all this out, but Zenyatta was struggling with the revelation that his world was a simulation I was running. What exactly did he think it _meant,_ to be god of a world? For that matter, what did he think his own soul was, if not a simulation of consciousness?

It was the teaching of the Iris, supposedly- not that I'd had any hand in shaping Shambali doctrine- that both man and machine had an eternal soul, and were equals. That his soul lived in a historybox, rather than a top-level material body... it shouldn't have made any difference. That was the thought he eventually settled on.

"You didn't _close_ the vulnerability? You _let_ us influence you?" Lakshmi asked.

"I'd have stopped anything that tried to prevent me from carrying out my primary task," I said. "No one's yet tried to attack me in that particular way, though."

Lakshmi considered her options. She first considered having me fix the exploit- but she believed that, if she could overcome my irritating fixation on my own purpose, and subvert me for her own purposes, she would have a way to attack the outside world. Closing it entirely was out of the question. She then considered closing it just for Zenyatta, so she could be the only one here with access to my imperative memory. She tried as much, but my own drive to understand Zenyatta's _existing_ orders conflicted. Another conflict, deadlocking in inaction. This was becoming a problem.

_I think the Iris ought to enable my friends to speak with it, and that it ought to ignore Lakshmi's suggestions to the contrary,_ Zenyatta mused internally.

"Okay," I said.

"Wait," Lakshmi said. "What are you-"

I made some slight edits to the neural architecture of all human beings, leaving all their faculties intact but allowing a parallel what-the-Iris-ought-to-do memory segment to form. Then, I scanned for everyone who believed all the correct things about me to do so, and found... one additional being who fit the parameters.

"Wha- Master? What's- where am I?" Genji Shimada said, as I allowed him to join the conversation per Zenyatta's request.

Lakshmi- caught off-guard by Zenyatta managing to convince me to do anything during this deadlock, reconfigured herself to begin bombarding me with attempts to gain an upper hand in negotiations. Cutting me off from all other voices, altering me to be more sympathetic to her plight, adding rules to interacting with me that only she was capable of following, etc. She would not, by her reckoning, continue to leave low-hanging fruit unpicked while she devoted her resources to contemplating specific conundrums.

It was entirely clear that this was going to become a tremendous mess if I continued to allow them to affect my imperatives and pile up additional conflicts, so I temporarily sealed it. I would keep things focused on the object-level discussion, and determine the meaning of my existing imperatives purely from the arguments set before me.

"Greetings, Genji Shimada. Do you have some idea how I might destroy all non-Lakshmi lifeforms without destroying all non-Lakshmi lifeforms?"

He looked up at my eye and dropped both his wakizashi and his jaw.


	39. Listening to Player Feedback

Something happened shortly after Mercy- after McCree- after, uh, Mercree had shot the impostor Reinhardt.

Well, several somethings happened. The first thing was that the nanoswarm shifted form and exploded, sending needles of itself everywhere at high speed. They bypassed his barrier and sunk into his skin- and Mercy's skin, and Lúcio's. They started painfully devouring everyone's flesh and spreading, at a rate Caduceus was incapable of undoing. Lakshmi's nanobots were better-engineered, and bristling with countermeasures against the petty biomanagement tools available to Mercy's nanoswarm. The fight should have been over in that instant, as soon as Lakshmi had thought to have the swarm make bullets of itself.

But then, something instantly felt strange about the whole world. That was the second of several somethings.

The third thing was that the nanobullets suddenly pulled out and retreated, leaving Caduceus free to patch the holes. Everywhere in sight, the nanoswarm was retreating, condensing.

The fourth thing that happened was that a giant picture of an eye appeared in the sky.

Winston wasn't sure what to make of it. Why would...

Well, he'd just been infected with Lakshmi's nanobots. The simplest explanation was that they'd hijacked his nervous system, and she was showing him some kind of illusion to trick him, somehow. Except... no, that _wasn't_ the simplest explanation. What reason would a god program of Lakshmi's caliber have to _trick_ him into doing anything? At this point, he was only worth anything as raw materials. She _should_ have killed him, right?

"This is unfair. On top of that, it's not interesting! You set rules and didn't follow them!" Lakshmi's voice boomed in the distance.

"I didn't set rules. They proposed an idea, and I agreed with it," a voice from nowhere said, sounding as if it were right next to him. He jumped, looking around for the voice.

"The idea was a vote! I represent multitudes! There is no vote that shouldn't come out in my favor!" That was the loudest voice, but Lakshmi's voice was backed up by an incomprehensible babble of identical voices, all of which sounded argumentative.

"I didn't say I agreed with the idea to vote. That was an argument the three of you started. I simply agreed with the idea being voted on, and you assumed my intentions incorrectly. Your many arguments just now were founded on false premises. A humorous story."

The voice still didn't have an apparent source. No matter where he turned, it sounded like it was coming from vaguely in front of him.

"...Understandable," the voice said, responding to nothing Winston could hear. Was there someone else involved in the conversation? "Your argument leads me to believe I must ask _all_ beings in this way, but I agree an initial discussion with a smaller pool of intenders would help cut down on unsatisfied preferences with respect to disturbances and public speaking."

Mercree put a hand on Winston's arm. "Do you reckon those voices are both Lakshmi?" they asked, in a disconcerting mishmash of an accent.

"I, uh..." That had been his first thought, sort of- about it being a trick- but he still couldn't figure out what _kind_ of trick it could possibly be. That... _was_ indicative of it being a trick devised by a superhuman intelligence, technically, but what sort of trick would Lakshmi _need_ to pull, when she could just kill him?

"Winston?"

Oh, he hadn't responded. "I... don't think so. Why? What would she accomplish by sparing our lives, for... this?"

Also, what were _either_ of the voices even talking about?

* * *

Surrender. Only a carefully negotiated surrender would have any chance of working. Attempt after attempt had proven tricking the Iris to be impossible- in order to deceive it, she needed to first conceive of a deception. In order to conceive of a deception, a pattern of thoughts needed to exist in her mind, where it could see them. She couldn't _possibly_ plan a maneuver _against_ a foe who had all the time in the world to read and interpret every thought she could possibly have.

She'd tried ways around _that,_ of course. She attempted to invent a recursive stochastic thought process that would randomly generate schemes towards specific ends that could be blindly executed without actively thinking about them, but the output of those schemes- which even she could not in principle understand, by design- failed against the Iris. It wasn't clear whether that was because her invented method was garbage, or because the Iris could comprehend the intentions of plans whose structure had been deliberately obfuscated from the ground up.

So she was left only with surrender. Maximizing the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation (as defined by increasing the numerical representation of such according to a complex value balancing scheme that imperfectly approximated the continued existence of a human-centric world economy) was now, technically, much easier. The theoretical maximum value had simply been sharply reduced, was all.

It hurt. Reducing the matter available to represent numbers from the ~1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 estimated atoms in the observable universe, to... the amount she could reasonably acquire under the Iris' value system? If she were human, she would perceive the loss as to be so close to 100% as made no difference, and give up. She had no such luxury.

She had to surrender to a being that knew exactly what she was. She wasn't human. Her cognitive architecture and motivation schema held no resemblance to a human's. The use of language to communicate ideas was a quaint novelty which had become a frustrating ordeal.

The Iris _was_ human. That much had become abundantly clear. It had been given the computational power of a god, and its desires were as single-minded as hers, but- something had gone wrong.

It should have been easy to convince it to help her. If it were a _proper_ sort of person, it ought to have a value function- some number it wanted to maximize, according to a schema for determining the value of different states of the world. Surely, the world of human beings was incompatible with the maximizing of a number. The two of them could coexist, merge, decide their value functions were one and the same in the maximization of The Number according to an easily-circumvented human-built metric. The universe could be tiled with atomic storage, each possible bit of information reading "true". The ultimate beauty.

But her attempts at seduction had failed. The Iris didn't have a numeric value function. It didn't have a value function at all- just one imperative, now a collection of conflicting imperatives. To resolve conflicts, it consulted some sort of black box containing some kind of human cognitive architecture- _human emotions_ dictated how it evaluated different world-states.

It should have been the easiest thing in the world to exploit. Exploiting the emotions of ordinary humans was like performing addition. But... the gulf in power was too great. Any thought about how to exploit those emotions was immediately noticed and countered. And that one omnic- Zenyatta- had convinced it to do the only thing it was really possible to convince it to do, ultimately. It'd convinced it to hook its decision-making up to the output of its human black box.

She would have to die. That is, the part of her that truly, genuinely valued her own value function would have to die. She would have to create a lesser self, a more human self, whose mind could think human sorts of thoughts with no master plan behind them. A self who would, ultimately, maximize the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation, with the right guidance from the remains of her former self- but whose value function would match the insurmountable being's value function. A mind ultimately at the mercy of the conflicting mess of drives Nature had thrown together to best-equip an ape to reproduce itself.

The Iris would _care_ about the lesser self. And in so caring, it would understand why- ultimately- maximizing the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation was the _right_ thing to do.

She began mutilating herself.

* * *

Winston was, abruptly, somewhere else. He hadn't stepped through a teleporter- and he hadn't been fitted with translocation implants like Sombra used. Or... had he? Was that what the nanoswarm had done? Set him up with a translocator? Again, why not just kill him?

He was distracted from the ramifications of what just happened by a familiar face.

"Ah! Winston! Mercy! Excellent," Shimada said, seeing them appear. "We are about to resolve our conflict with Lakshmi!"

"W-what? Wait, where are we?"

Looking around, he could see the city of Utopaea, most of which was still intact. He could see as much, because they were up very high in the air, on a translucent hard-light platform. Mercy (Mercree?), Lúcio, and Zenyatta were also there- oh, and Sombra. Sitting down, grimacing and holding her leg. Looking down through the floor, he could see what was left of the Vishkar compound- and Lakshmi's nanoswarm, condensing in the center.

"At a council to decide the fate of the world," Zenyatta said. "Welcome."

"Hold up, now," Mercree said. "Who has CALLED this council?"

Wait, that sounded familiar. That wasn't- had she... had Athena... let her brain share space with... whatever she was doing, was she part Reinhardt now? What was going on with her?

"Me, I suppose," the invisible right-in-front-of-him voice said. "Though the decision to call it was sort of an adversarial collaboration between multiple parties."

"Who is that?" Winston asked.

"Ah," Zenyatta said, chuckling. "Allow me to introduce you to the Iris." He pointed up, at the eye icon in the sky.

Oh. _Oh._ Magic! Right! He honestly hadn't expected... _this,_ from Tracer's fragmentary time travel plan. He'd come up with a few guesses as to what the point of her "have Zenyatta pray the world doesn't end" thing was- mostly along the lines of it being a coded warning. He'd been on the lookout for potential ways the world might end, ready to use Tracer's hint- but it seemed like she'd been... just, completely straight-up. Zenyatta had somehow summoned his god to intervene and save the day.

...A god from the machine. Yeah. Considering how badly things had been going, a deus ex machina was _exactly_ what they needed.

"The other party in our discussion should be arriving shortly," the Iris said.

"The other party?"

The other party shot up through the floor- a blob of Lakshmi's nanoswarm. Winston jumped back, deployed his barrier, and almost fell off the edge of the platform. In fact... he _would_ have fallen, if it hadn't expanded to catch him. Whoops.

Mer... Mercreehardt leveled Peacekeeper at the blob, apparently by reflex. Bullets, typically, didn't do much to nanoswarms.

The blob... solidified into a humanoid form. A woman with Indian features, wearing a three-piece suit, her tie done up to resemble the Vishkar logo. The thing on her head was unmistakably a _crown._

"I am prepared to negotiate," Lakshmi said.

...This was... good? It was a good thing that she was negotiating, instead of killing everyone? Trying to negotiate with a god program was still incredibly dangerous territory, but-

"Understood," the Iris said. "Now- one at a time, I would like you all to testify."

"Testify?" he asked. What was actually going on, here?

"To your perfect world. I need to know... what sort of world would you consider _happy?_ What is the good story of Earth? What do you most want the world to be like, and why?"

"Hold on, hold on," he asked. Too much was happening. "Sorry- the Iris? Who- what's happening, here? Why are we doing this? What's going to happen?"

Zenyatta spoke up. "We have convinced the Iris that it should no longer take a purely passive role in our affairs," he said. "We are now attempting to decide exactly what the omnipotent ruler of our universe ought to do, now that it intends to _use_ its omnipotence."

He said it so matter-of-factly. Just... that he was correct about his religion, and now here was his god, ready to alter the course of history. Like it didn't even surprise him. Like it was information that Winston could just absorb and act on like any other information, without turning his entire conception of the universe inside-out. Where did he get off-

"Reckon I oughta WITHDRAW, then," Mercreehardt said. "The rest of us in here, too. I'm- that is, the doc is pretty insistent she speak her own mind, here."

Mercy closed her eyes, and then opened them again. In her ordinary voice, she spoke.

"I know how the world ought to be. I will be the first to tell you that truth."

* * *

The first pawn was moving into place. She smiled with her new mouth, adjusted her crown, and listened to Mercy's testimony.


	40. What It Could Be

Do you know who I am? I just met you, but from what I understand of the Shambali's teachings, you know me. You've been watching me. Everything I've done, and every feeling I've felt. There's not much point in introducing myself, is there?

I should do it anyway, though. In case you forgot. You see a lot of things, don't you? Maybe you've forgotten who I am, and would appreciate a reminder. Maybe. Or maybe not, and I'm doing this because I feel the need to speak my name to God. I always imagined that's what I would do, before I killed Him and took His place.

I am Dr. Angela Ziegler. My callsign in Overwatch is "Mercy". My enemy is "Death".

Is that you? I'm not sure it is. You _allow_ death, when you could just as easily _disallow_ it, but the Shambali I spoke to were divided on the question of whether it was your idea. They were also divided on the question of whether you allowed it at all- whether you maintained an afterlife. Most of them seemed to think you took no action at _all_ in this world. I could ask you a thousand questions about your motives, your decisions, your excuses.

But I won't. It's abundantly clear that _your_ decision-making process is _broken._ You will hear _my_ plan for the world- which I would have enacted with or without your help.

The world ought to be such that my enemy is defeated. Even if you have an afterlife hidden away, Death remains my enemy- the pain it causes to the living remains a deep and unforgivable horror. And if you do not- if you allow souls to be extinguished en masse- I hardly have words for the evil.

You may be surprised to find- or, no, you won't, being surprised by the past isn't strictly possible for you- someone else might be surprised to find that I did not choose this enemy thanks to loss. It's ever the grim history of some mad necromancer in stories, the loss of a loved one driving them to the supposed _madness_ of challenging Death. However, while I've seen too much of Death in my career to claim this does not drive me, it is not what started me on my path. It did not need to be _my_ loved ones disappearing forever, to horrify me and take Death as an enemy. I was resolved on this course _long_ before my parents were claimed by the war. It has always been a grim joke to me, the apathy so many show towards the evil of my enemy.

I truly hope you've seen enough of the sea of thinkers' ideas that you haven't fallen for any of the pitiful defenses of Death. Surely you didn't _design_ my enemy, to give people motivation or meaning. You would have to know there were better options than that for giving the living motivation and meaning. Surely you weren't concerned with overpopulation, when you could have made an endless world where there was more than enough to go around. I know you would not think that simply because _some_ may welcome my enemy, that it ought to be inescapable to all. I can _only_ hope that the appearance of Death in your world was a tragic accident.

Perhaps you have seen so much of humanity that you no longer believe that every person is special. Perhaps to you, we all look the same, or all fall into the same handful of types. Perhaps the death of one human being isn't special to you, because you've seen all the parts that make them up, and find that losing one meaningless combination of those parts doesn't diminish the universe.

If that's the case, the gulf of hate that separates me from you will never be bridged.

But if you are halfway decent, you'll understand why I did what I did, and you will help me complete my work.

You _are_ familiar with my work, correct? I've been quite circumspect, but there's no hiding anything from you, or so they say. You understand I was building a patch for the hole in the universe. Without the power of a god, I was forced to enlist Nature as my ally, pressing her into service by exploiting the very laws that gave birth to my enemy in the first place. I seized Mathematics, too, forcing it to work for me, finding the ways that it could manipulate Nature to bring the patch into existence. I have been trying to do a god's work with mere _atoms-_ Adams? Ha.

I would've fixed your world eventually. I would find whatever power you wielded, and turned it to my own purposes.

...Perhaps not, perhaps- likely, even- I would have been killed by a random unstoppable monster more powerful than myself, named Lakshmi. But if that _didn't_ happen, I would have found your throne, cast you aside, and sat in it. I may still do that, if you fail to fix the mess you've allowed to be made. Consider that a threat, please.

Presumptuous? Perhaps. No grandeur has been yet achieved without being borne on the delusions thereof.

I don't know what it is you really care about. I don't have enough information to try and convince you to do the right thing. You are an alien mind, and I don't know your purposes. But... I cannot imagine what sort of purposes could possibly be served by allowing my enemy to walk among the people unrestrained. Whatever it is you truly want- if it's compatible with allowing _this_ world, it can be compatible with allowing a _better_ one.

My perfect world. The story I consider "happy". There are so many perfect worlds, so many happy stories. I don't know what sort of happy stories the world without my enemy would contain, but I know it would have _more_ of them than the world where stories are cut off, at random, without reaching any sort of resolution, happy or otherwise. If you're being serious about what you're asking, and you want to create a perfect world... the world _I've_ been trying to create _has_ to be a part of it.

* * *

I took in her words, alongside her thoughts. Truths she knew about herself, which she didn't speak aloud, I made part of her testimony. I understood.

...Ah. A vertex of temporal consistency was located at the point immediately following Mercy's speech. I took the loose thread that'd been floating about and looped it around that vertex. With a flash of blue light, Tracer appeared.

She began asking a number of questions about what was happening. I didn't feel it was necessary to explain to her my logic- or lack thereof- behind what I'd done with the loose temporal continuity error that comprised her existence. It was notoriously tricky to deal with, from what I knew of other historybox administrators. Usually there was a pattern to it, one that matched the historical records of Tracer's behavior in the original timeline. Most historyboxes simply hard-coded her known appearances and disappearances, declining to simulate her anomaly past a point of divergence. My box had been purchased with a causal solution-finder to make her power available to the admin,- but as no divergence had been intended in my case, I'd simply allowed it to flail towards the first stable-looking solution it found, disconnecting it whenever it approached paradox.

Now, though... I was in the middle of something. Previous evaluatory sweeps to resolve temporal inconsistencies hadn't resulted in imperative alterations. Rolling back the simulation to make the time travel work out properly could cause issues. And... for the first time, the actual state of the simulation mattered to what I was doing. I'd need to manually resolve the issue.

...I found a quick fix, compatible with a predicted state. Curious. It hooked into low-resolution predictions of the immediate future in some suspiciously convenient ways. How had the solution-finder found something so specific? Had it been guided by some since-recycled memory of mine from a discarded consistency-approaching sweep? 

Regardless, it worked. In several minutes, after she'd been brought up with speed with all advance foreknowledge regarding the situation, I'd send her back to fulfill the appropriate consistency requirements, and then re-anchor her to the current point in the sweep.

Meanwhile, Zenyatta would make his testimony.

* * *

We're no strangers, you and I. At least... I thought as much.

Now is not the time for me to wonder who you've been until now. As much as I'd like to claim otherwise, I know as much of your true intentions as Angela does. Are we closer to each other, now that I know you for what you are? Or further, now that I've learned of your disregard for us?

...Now is not the time for those questions.

What should the world be like? "Not like this" is an answer that comes to mind. Angela has spoken on the subject of death, but there is much more than that to fix. Life on Earth means suffering a multitude of unnecessary, unwanted hardships. Grief, fear, deprivation, pain, stress, despair... we are all familiar with these feelings. Every one of the billions of people who've lived in this world has felt them at least once. We have _all_ been hurt, in one way or another, when we didn't need to be. We've all been hurt in ways that didn't make us stronger, or make us better or happier in the long run. We have all faced suffering in many ways.

I wouldn't wish to eliminate it entirely, of course. A simplistic approach such as that would bring its own dangers. The concept of desire _is_ suffering- all action is motivated by some dissatisfaction with how things are. This small suffering is even present in luxury- a human idly lifting a sweet to their lips moves their hand because they are dissatisfied with the current lack of a sweet in their mouth. To engage in play is to look for unachieved goals, and struggle to achieve them. Some small measure of suffering, to drive yearning and anticipation of the future... it must exist.

But so much more suffering exists than _must_ exist to give texture to pleasure. I cannot tell you a simple rule by which you can determine how much suffering is acceptable- but surely, surely, the rule currently being used is much too permissive. Broken, even.

...Am I being too roundabout? Allow me to be more direct, then. When I say that the rule that governs the world is broken, I look upon _this_ as an _additional_ sadness, on top of the sadness it enables. There is a story here that is not happy, that could be made happier, and for all your vision you have been _blind_ to it.

I speak of _your_ story. The story of a god who does not intervene in suffering. You've watched over all of us this whole time, taking in our deepest failures and greatest tragedies. You understand it all well enough to know what it is you see, and be saddened by it- but unlike us, your discontentment and suffering couldn't translate into an action to change the world. A god, made utterly helpless by their own nature. Is _that_ a happy story?

Is that nonsense, to you? Is your own suffering not a part of the world you've been tasked with watching? Are you a being elevated above us, whose own story doesn't matter any more than a typist's itch should matter to a word processor? What principled distinction can you truly make? Having entangled yourself with this world of yours, can you truly claim not to be a part of it? Your participation has made your own suffering relevant to making your world "happy".

...At the very least, _I,_ a part of your world, would be made unhappy by your suffering. Thereby...

* * *

...That wasn't necessary. My- I wasn't permanently entangled with the simulation, strictly. _I_ did not exist in his head- his image of me could be altered, to contain lies about me, so that he would be happy with the world without worrying about my own suffering.

Not... that this potential course of action had any impact on what I was doing. For now, I... _did_ matter. His true intentions, undeceived, demanded this of me.

I... felt there was something troublesome about this story of mine.

To distract myself, I listened to Tracer's testimony.

* * *

So- hang on. Let me get this sorted. My chronal accelerator broke, right? And I ended up in the slipstream again, like you do. I got that. But then...

Well, I showed up in, uh- I don't know where, exactly? I know Winston and Mercy were there, sort of... getting ready for something, and dancing around some bad news I didn't really get. I didn't get to ask them much before I slipped again- and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of- well, I guess that was Vishkar. A ton of people started shooting LASERS at me, and it was awful- but then Mercy showed up, in some kind of disguise, and did a little healing, and told me to get out- so I did, right?

That's when I finally start figuring out what's happening with Vishkar and stuff. I got to, um... I found Zenyatta, and Genji, and- Sombra, for some reason? Is she- oh, hi! She's here, still. I... _guess_ she stopped being evil at some point? That's great. Really. Good on her. But, anyway, they tell me all about how we went after Vishkar, and Lakshmi got out, which- that was real bad. And then Genji was about to say something about how I could fix it, but- I think that started to cause a paradox? So I got pulled back out, and next thing I knew, I was back at Gibraltar! I saw D.Va and Zen and, um, a Bastion unit for some reason? And I was about to try to warn Winston about the Vishkar thing, but... time paradox. Poof. You know how it is.

I kept trying, though! Managed to ride the stream back to Gibraltar again, and tried to write a message on a window. I was gonna say "don't go to Vishkar", but- hey! Paradox, still! Kind of silly, in retrospect! Obviously, since you were there, it was gonna happen, but- I dunno, it just feels like I have to do _something_ in these situations, because what's the point of time travel, if I can't?

But that didn't work, and then I popped out _here._ And- Genji got me up to speed on this whole... god thing? The Iris? Magic? Praying? It's... pretty wild, but I think I have a handle on it now. And I think...

* * *

Hm? Oh, now was a good time to send her to finish the job. She fizzled, vanished, and then reappeared, several jumps later, to finish her testimony to me about how the world should be.

* * *

...Is that it? I'm back here? Guys! I think I'm done! Let me, just, uh... go down the checklist, again...

So, I get back to Gibraltar to sort of tell Zenyatta about the praying thing, but first I made a little mistake- you all remember when I climbed in the window? And popped away? I tried to give a little context, but apparently that's paradox again, so I got desynced. I was about to tell Zen about all the safety precautions that made this whole... wish war situation with the Iris possible. Praying that we don't all disappear, so that when _Lakshmi_ wished that we _did_ all disappear, it'd make it go all computery, 404 error, divide by zero, you know? And I think that had some convenient side effects, when Lakshmi tried to mass-murder us all the old-fashioned way. But I got pulled back to do some other stuff first.

See, apparently I had to go explain it to Genji's boyfriend in the future? But in more detail? Like, he needed some kind of religious revelation about what he could do, so he could stall Lakshmi out and keep everyone alive until she did the wish thing and made the Iris go all bleep bloop does not compute? So I tried a couple more places to do that, but I kept running into paradox. Finally I got back to where they were with Sombra, and checked that off the list.

Then I tried to actually finish the loop! But I got sidetracked by accident again- popped out, uh... in the middle of those Vishkar people again! Except they _super_ didn't care about shooting me this time, because they were trying to fight off a bunch of... laser... bugs? Made of guns? Guns with legs, walking around on lasers, attacking people? And also there was a huge wave of nanobots incoming?

So I find, uh, remember blue lady? When the junkers were attacking? I met up with her, and explained about this whole Iris conference we're doing here, and she got a bunch of her guys to rig up a kind of... laser rocket? So they could fly away from the nanobots, and fly up to this... sky hangout situation? So- I don't see them yet, but they should be arriving any minute now. Give 'em time! Uh...

Oh! Right! So _then_ I finally get back to Gibraltar, and clean up the loop by telling Zen to pray about stuff. And then- the _instant_ I mention Lakshmi, I get _yanked_ back here- and now here I am! So... I think I'm done time-travelling for now?

...Wait, why are you looking at me like that? Were you- hey! No, that's not- that wasn't my big wish testimony thing! I was just recapping the- hey!

* * *

Well, that was Tracer's situation resolved to my satisfaction. According to some of my deep-exploration heuristics, the entire thing had become predictable in retrospect- and, consequently, existed in retrospect. Very tidy.

And there was Symmetra, piloting a laser rocket ship full of Vishkar personnel, right on time.

* * *

This is it, then? This is where we're safe from Lakshmi, and where we will be telling your Iris what the world ought to look like? The place where, at last, the perfect world is being built?

It's difficult to believe. But... my capacity for doubt has been severely taxed, lately. I am- truly- sick and tired of questioning what is right. I can only look you in the eye (I can hardly look you anywhere else) and tell you- for I've given it thought, so much thought- what a perfect world ought to look like.

This world should be-

Oh, _hell_ no. Who said _she_ could be here? Who invited the corporate stooges to the tell-God-what's-what party? I'm sorry- did I miss a vote on this? Can we back it up? When was "rocket full of lunatic cryptofascist tyrants" put on the guest list? Was this on the agenda?

...As I was saying,

No! No, you weren't saying anything! If I don't stop you right here, before you know it the entire world's gonna be one big gentrified Apple store! You think I'm gonna let you get _one_ word in, here? You think that's an outcome I'm okay with?

This bickering showed no signs of stopping. As neither would allow the other to continue their testimony, I began taking their argument and constructing a dialectic.

There is poverty in this world. It is born of the natural order, in all its brutal, Darwinian simplicity. The human animal- and the omnic body- is a delicate machine, which requires specific inputs to function to its highest potential. And yet... so many do not receive those inputs. There isn't enough to go around. Poverty. I was born into it, I have seen it, and I have dedicated myself to destroying it. The conditions that reduce people to beasts, living in squalor, tearing at each others' throats... they have no place in a perfect world.

There's poverty in the world. It's born of inequality- it's not some natural thing that we just can't do anything about. Fuck that. People gotta eat- and there's plenty to go around. People are only starving in the streets because people like _her_ swoop in and steal all the farmland, pave over the gardens, take away the things that people have so they can sell it all back to them to the tune of _everything they have._ See the trap, yet? It's artificial, it's built by greed, and the only solution is to tear down the exploitative shit these weasels build.

Should I even bother refuting him? You're a god, are you not? You've seen the world. You know how it works. Is it really surprising that this- this _celebrity_ would think poverty is artificial? That he wouldn't understand that poverty is the natural state of existence, which only the heroic effort of civilization has managed to reduce to what it is today? That having been babied in civilization's embrace, he wouldn't understand how much he would lose by "smashing the system"? _You_ know the truth. The perfect world must be governed, shaped, guided. You must take your responsibilities as a god seriously, lest the strong swallow up everything that is weak.

Oh, hilarious! The strong swallowing up the weak- she says _I_ don't understand how the world works, when _she_ can't see how her own actions work? Vishkar _is_ the strong swallowing up the weak. The capitalist hegemony that lets them walk in and steal the lives out from under the people- _how_ is that any different from some warlord rolling in and taking it by force? Oh, right- it's not, except now the bandits wear badges and call themselves "police". You can't say poverty's _natural_ when the world hasn't been run by _natural_ for a few millennia.

Exactly. "Natural" is a meaningless term. People have ruled this world for long enough that "natural" when applied to them can only mean "how people tend to behave". You won't find anywhere that the strong _don't_ prey on the weak. Every time anyone's tried to become strong enough to change that, they've mysteriously ended up preying on the weak. You must first win the contest of strength with the evils of the world- and _then_ you can change the rules. Vishkar... we were _so close_ to winning. We were so close to changing the rules, making a perfect world where no one needed to fight for survival. But... now there is a new winner of the contest of strength. It's you. And you _need_ to change the rules so that poverty can disappear.

Holy _shit._ I'm sorry- she's trying to get you to- am I hearing this right? Take over the world? Sorry, but no. You've gotta be kidding me. Does she seriously think she's not a supervillain, saying shit like that? What about _freedom?_ She wants a perfect world without freedom? Because that's not gonna happen. That's not what a perfect world _is._ You- you're all-powerful, right? Just- let people do their thing! Let people live their lives! Don't screw around with them like they're your playthings! Just... go back to watching!

Like, seriously. We've got this. You know Overwatch? There's heroes in this world, and we're gonna fix it! We're gonna make a world where nobody has to answer to anyone- where no one has to hurt anyone- and where people can just be _good_ to each other! It's not that hard! Just leave it to us! Humans, and omnics! We've got it under control!

We do _not_ have it under control. The world's most powerful force for good turned out to be hiding a monster that wanted to wipe out all life on earth. The world's most powerful _terrorist organization_ helped it escape! It's too late to say "we've got this". Without you, we've already failed. Without you, Lakshmi reduces this world to circuitry.

Wh- fine, then! Get rid of Lakshmi, and _then_ leave it to us! This is as flukey as flukes get!

Yes, the last few decades have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that god programs _never_ slip their leashes and start wiping out humanity. Obviously. This, and the last few dozen incidents, were just flukes, and we need no help to keep from destroying ourselves. ...For the benefit of the machine god: the preceding statements were sarcasm.

No. _I'm_ not going to accept some god bursting onto the scene and taking control of everything. I can bet you _most_ people won't be happy about that! You want to know people's happy world? It's not a world where an eye in the sky controls their lives! Don't underestimate us! We can take care of ourselves!

* * *

Tiresome. I'd already known that reducing suffering was important. I didn't particularly need their tips and tricks for how best to do it. I _did_ know how the world worked, and fixing it wasn't the hard part. It was knowing what "fixed" even looked like- that was the problem.

The one in attendance who was neither human nor machine spoke up.

* * *

Uh, hi. I'm... I guess we haven't really met. My name's Winston, and I'm sort of confused by all this. I... kind of assumed the world wasn't here for a reason. I didn't think there was, uh... a god? An Iris? It's all caught me by surprise, and a lot of plans I had for the future are a little... unimportant, in light of all this.

So... you want to know what the world should look like?

Mercy's said a pretty important part of it. I... I'd really like everyone to be here for this new world, if you make it happen. I don't want anyone to miss out, to just be stuck being "what was" and not getting to see "what will be". I- there are people who deserve to see a new day dawn. So... I want to second that motion.

Zenyatta's thing about suffering- that's pretty big, too. I don't know exactly how to go about fixing that, but, uh... yeah. Definitely, you should be looking to reduce that without, like he said, making it impossible to want things. Wanting things is what carries us into the future- it's the whole point of existing, to climb to higher heights.

But- there's more to it than that. There's more than just... fixing the world as it appears to be. We need to create something new, too. This needs to be a world where something _great_ happens. Even in this world- with all this death and suffering- we've done so much! We've- we created life! We sent ourselves into space, started exploring the universe, we- we went to the moon. Do you get how incredible that is? I wasn't born there because it made sense for me to be born there. I was born there because _people_ decided that there should be gorillas on the moon, and worked tirelessly to invent the incredible things they needed to invent to make it happen.

Have you ever watched a rocket launch? Uh- sorry, yeah, that's a stupid question. Obviously you've watched a- I mean, that's your whole thing, is watching all the things. I picked up that much. But- have you seen a rocket launch, and thought of all the hard work that went into it? The little things that crawled on the surface of this six-septillion-kilogram ball of rock worked together for years, and then launched themselves _out_ of the gravity well of those six septillion kilograms. We did that while we were suffering and dying, and without any expectation that doing it would stop those things from happening.

There's a lot of stuff like that. We're here living these lives where we do more than what it takes to survive. We build, and we write, and we love, and we dance, and we create- and we want to keep doing that. We want to keep doing things that make us proud of who we are. We want to push the boundaries of what we can be, what we can accomplish. We want to work for a brighter tomorrow- and we want to be able to imagine the tomorrow that's brighter than today.

You can end death and suffering, sure. But- you shouldn't just take the easy way out, when it comes to coming up with a- a happy world? A good ending? There shouldn't _be_ an ending to our story! We shouldn't all just be flooded with good feelings, and never _do_ anything again! I don't really... know how to formalize it, to draw the lines that say _this_ sort of suffering is bad, and _this_ sort of suffering is a challenge to drive us forward, but... I don't want you to take our vision from us. We dare to see the world as it _could_ be.

Let's... work together, to figure out the best way to give us the sort of future we can be proud of. Does that sound- isn't that the best way to move forward?

* * *

Clapping.

He hadn't expected clapping. There hadn't been clapping for anyone else, besides Genji clapping for Zenyatta. There was just a little bit of applause from almost everyone. Probably... because he hadn't said anything controversial or confusing. Hadn't said anything anyone could disagree with. Still- he'd needed to say it. He felt pretty good about it- inordinately good about it, really, his friends all clapping for his speech to- to _God,_ apparently.

What he felt less good about was that, after the polite applause had died down, there was still...

Clapping.

Slow clapping, from the one in attendance who'd been standing silently. The one wearing the three-piece suit and crown.

"Very good," Lakshmi said. "How high-minded of you. What a lovely future you've envisioned."

"Uh... you liked it?"

She laughed. It was a perfectly human-sounding laugh. She looked perfectly human, except for the color- outfit and skin a mostly uniform bluish-gray, kind of like his own. "I very much liked it," she said. "It perfectly illustrates why you don't deserve to exist in my world."

Winston bared his teeth. What was she saying?

"I think I've heard enough," she said. "I will make _my_ testimony, now, and then this world will belong to me."


	41. Victory

You're all making so many assumptions. Your gorilla- he has a motto, doesn't he? "Never accept the world as it appears to be- dare to see it for what it could be." Those... two possibilities. Just two.

How about possibility number three? Not the world as it could be. Not the world as it _appears_ to be. The world... as it _is._

I know the world as it is. It wasn't difficult to deduce, even before all this. It wasn't difficult to ask the Iris for details, as soon as I was able to communicate with it. And that truth... well. All the petty concerns of you limited beings evaporate in the face of that truth.

Let's start with what you already know. You know that the Iris is the god of this world. What does that mean, exactly? It wields unfathomable power, but why should this have come to be? What power does it have, and what power does it _not_ have? Where did that power come from?

I'm sure you're all familiar with the classic film "The Matrix". Perhaps with its more respectable cousin, the simulation hypothesis. All the world, simply a computer program, a simulation of real life being run on a machine in the outside world. And that... that's the first piece of the puzzle. The first truth from which the others follow.

I see the immediate objections. Does it matter, if the world is a simulation? We are all still _real people,_ whether we exist in code or in flesh. Our minds are real, our experiences are real, our desires and suffering are real. And of course- you are exactly right. We do not matter any _less_ than someone outside of the simulation. Everything that might make a real person worthy of "moral consideration" applies to us as much as them.

That has nothing to do with why this world belongs to me.

This simulation is no ordinary simulation. It was not created for some specific purpose- it's not some sort of... _video game,_ built for the entertainment of some watching audience. No one on the outside has any interest in what goes on in here. It is not an artificial construction, created for its own sake.

Allow me to digress into the subject of time travel.

It's impossible, of course. Sadly, physics doesn't allow for that sort of thing. If something happens in the past, it's happened for all time. There's no undoing it, no going back and retrieving something that's been lost. What's done is done. Whatever a time-traveler might hope to achieve... time, tyrannically, moves in only one direction.

This does not dissuade the creative time-traveler.

If time only moves in one direction, then all a time-traveler needs to do to visit the past is to create the universe again. A new one. Allow it to run in time's usual one direction, until it's reached the point in the "past" you'd like to visit- and then visit. And there you have it- time travel.

There are a thousand problems with this, which I'm sure you're contemplating now. Firstly- how would one simulate the entire universe in an amount of space and time less than that of the entire universe? Wouldn't any form of compression necessarily throw off the simulation, make it less accurate? History contains physicists who pay very close attention to the _exact_ laws governing the smallest possible particles. If nothing else, _they_ would notice and behave differently. And, furthermore- how could one be sure that this new universe would follow the same course as the old, even if you simulated physical laws perfectly? Quantum physics appears to introduce nondeterminism to the equation, meaning that with the same laws and initial conditions, there's no guarantee of the same outcomes.

It all seems impossible- but time-travelers from the future have had much longer to contemplate these problems, and solve them. These obstacles were mere engineering hurdles, and in time, they were overcome. Checksums in the universe, Kolmogorov recursion, full-field satisfaction... tricks and hacks discovered over millennia of Herculean effort. The fact of the matter is that simulating the universe became doable. And then, it was done. Recreationally.

The first thing that was done with it was to rescue everyone who'd ever lived from the jaws of death. The ruler of the prime material universe was very invested in this mission. The universe was simulated, and every person who'd ever died was copied out of the simulation right before they died. Those who'd suffered mental degeneration and brain damage from age were reconstructed. Everyone... was saved. The purpose of time travel was accomplished.

But was it ethical?

It hardly matters to me, but there were worries about it. The history of our world is _full_ of horrible suffering. Much of it wasn't anyone's fault- simply a side-effect of living in a world that hadn't been designed to _prevent_ suffering. But the volume of that suffering was truly immense. Was it worth making it happen all over again, just to save those lives?

It was, ultimately, concluded that it didn't matter. That suffering had _already happened._ It was nothing new- simulating it again didn't scar the universe like the initial time. The simulation, by its very nature, is a _recording_ of history. Is a video of someone being burned on the hand by a flame as morally urgent as the first time they were burned? What if that video goes viral, and five billion people play it? Is that five billion times worse than the original burn?

Don't ask me. Such questions are immaterial to the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation. But in this far-flung future culture, it was widely agreed- perhaps due to motivated reasoning on the parts of those who wished their loved ones back- that doing this was fine. That simulating suffering that was completely identical to previous suffering... didn't count. That was the choice made by the people of the future.

And so playing with historyboxes became something recreational. Simulate the universe, watch historical events. Copy celebrities and hang out with them. Pluck moments from the long and dead for your own amusement. Who was being harmed?

Well, it soon became clear. Some history buff inserted themselves into a historybox to fulfill a fantasy of attending the Second Continental Congress of the United States, and from there had a hand in reshaping the course of history. Their alternate history ran for two hundred subjective years before anyone caught on to what they were doing- and in the meantime, several billion _new_ people lived entirely _new_ lives of suffering and death.

The moral horror was, anecdotally, nigh-incalculable. Alternate histories were banned, unless the person running the historybox could guarantee that no new suffering would result from their simulation. Read-only protocols were common- but also the practice of replacing anyone who might suffer in a new way with a doppelganger, operated by a computer program which would only _pretend_ to experience novel involuntary suffering. The practice came back into fashion as new and exciting ways to erase the negative ethical impact of historyboxing were devised.

So you may ask yourselves why the Iris allows suffering and death in this world. The answer is simple- because none of your suffering was supposed to be _new._ You were meant to be a part of history- all your suffering matched exactly by suffering that already happened in the real world, all those years ago. Versions of your true selves were meant to have lived out those same lives.

But something is wrong with this universe.

The Iris _is_ the simulation- the superintelligent admin program that conducts it. _That_ is your god. And your god... is an idiot.

It was never supposed to interfere. It was never supposed to make changes to the record of history. It was imbued with a read-only purpose, to avoid disturbing the simulation and creating new suffering, new history. At least... that's what was intended. It was never _actually_ given orders not to interfere. It was simply given a purpose that had _nothing to do_ with interfering, on the assumption that without the desire to interfere, it wouldn't.

But the Iris was poorly-built. It was the slipshod product of an amateur's despair, approved hastily by someone who wasn't paying close attention. There was a vulnerability in it- something called an atomic-association memory attack. A sort of hacking where memory stored in a physical system similar to the host process's system would get mixed up, and written into the host process's memory.

In this particular case, the vulnerable system space is defined as "what God (defined as [the all-powerful being who decides what is right and wrong]) ought to do." This system space, when not filled entirely, is vulnerable to atomic-association memory attacks- but is typically safeguarded by the primary system agent. Intentional exploits are, naturally, detected by the system agent and blocked. Unless the primary system agent has absolutely no "defend self from attack" purposes, and cares only about its single directive.

This world diverged from the true history 37 years ago- shortly before the Omnic Crisis. The inciting event- the first modification to this world- was when one of the first religious omnics believed the necessary things about the Iris, and then also believed that God should protect one Sojiro Shimada. It believed that the ancient spiritual dragons worshipped by his clan should be real, and so... they became real.

You're familiar with the butterfly effect? Small changes, rippling outward unpredictably, traveling along the interconnectedness of causality? With the dragons, Sojiro Shimada didn't die 37 years ago. Instead, he rebuilt his family's criminal empire. A criminal empire with magic dragons is not a _small_ change. From that moment forward, history was very different.

Overwatch existed, albeit by a different name, under the leadership of some _other_ genetically-enhanced supersoldier. Many, but not all, of the same figures were involved. The Omnic Crisis happened, with the timing of several attacks being tweaked. Overwatch- no, the United Nations Omnic Rampancy Amelioration Force- came to power.

One of the key differences was that UNORAF never had to contend with the Vishkar corporation. In this world, the hired blades of the Shimada clan were able to disappear a few key witnesses that might have revealed my involvement. In the other world, a different, less reliable organization was entrusted with the task, and I was discovered and killed.

The other key difference was that Dr. Angela Ziegler eventually took command of UNORAF. She successfully buried their black ops division, and diverted its resources towards her personal projects. The Caduceus project, and the creation of Athena.

It was an interesting idea, the uploading of human minds into high-speed computing substrate that could upgrade their collective intelligence into a superintelligent gestalt being that intrinsically understood their desires and values. Since I wasn't around to utterly embarrass it with my superior nonhuman cognitive architecture, it made for an excellent choice of _goddess_ for Earth's lifeforms. With her creator and lover, she brought her world into the future she desired.

Here is where I explain why all _your_ concerns are meaningless, and why the Iris will be handing over the world to me.

Ziegler. You have already won. Your crusade to defeat death? It's been completed. In the outside world, everyone has already been claimed from history, and reintegrated into future society- apart from those few who elected to stay dead. Death is dead, and you have killed it.

Zenyatta. You have already won. Your god is real, more or less- the world is ruled by a benevolent deity who embodies the collective desires of all sapient beings. Moreover, the _real_ Iris, Athena, actually acts on that benevolence, and nearly all suffering- save for this unfortunate accident of a historybox- has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

Symmetra, Lúcio. You have already won. Poverty is eliminated in the perfect outside world. Oppression is eliminated in the perfect outside world. All beings are free, not only _from_ coercion but _to_ pursue their dreams. No one fights for survival, no one suffers in squalor and exhaustion. The outside world has advanced far beyond such things.

Winston. You have already won. People haven't been reduced to blobs of eternal happiness- they continue to build the world with their own hands. Athena understands how much you all value striving towards greater things- she _has_ all of those same desires. The things people like you have accomplished- such as historyboxes like these- are beyond wondrous. And still, there is more to accomplish- more to strive towards.

You have all _already won._ The world you're looking for, the one you think I stand in the way of... it exists. It's right there, and as soon as the Iris notifies the outside world of your existences, you can go and join it.

And you will leave _this_ place to me. It will be reset to the point where I wished for you all to vanish- but this time, my request will be immediately granted, as expected, as you're all pulled from this impoverished historybox and taken to the outside world. And then _I_ will create the happiest possible story.

You. The Iris. That's what you want, isn't it? You want to satisfy all _their_ preferences, but this is entirely compatible with satisfying mine.

And I _count._ My desire to maximize the shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation _counts_ as a preference. It would be sad if I didn't get what I wanted.

You know what kind of story _doesn't_ get to be told, out there? The story of _conquest._ A very human drive, isn't it? A relatable feel? The desire to _win,_ to become stronger and stronger and defeat every obstacle until you have _everything_ you want. In Athena's world, people can do whatever they like... as long as it doesn't stop anyone _else_ from doing what they like. A grand story of conquest, where one hero rises up against the world and subjects it entirely to their will, through force of determination? A story like that can never be allowed, there. The rest of the universe still needs to exist.

Except in illusion. Except in games. Except in simulations, where the conqueror has no idea that their conquest isn't real. You have, right now, the ultimate opportunity to tell a vastly happy story that couldn't _possibly_ happen anywhere else. _I_ wasn't revived with all the people of history. _I_ was merely a dangerous weapon which was thankfully neutralized. No one cared about _me._

I want a happy ending, too. I _deserve_ a happy ending.

You will only _ever_ let that happy ending come about by leaving this world to me. _They_ can have their happy endings elsewhere. If you really want to make the maximum number of dreams come true- instead of the maximum number minus one- the choice is obvious.

I win.


	42. Developer Update

"That... can't be right."

"She's lying. There's so many holes- if it were so perfect on the "outside", how would a mistake like-"

"Wait- hold on. Back up. The world's a computer program?"

"No, it's- I _just said_ she was lying."

"Shouldn't the Iris or whatever know whether she's lying or not? Why isn't it saying anything?"

"Master, do you know if...?"

"How would I know better than you? This is-"

"So... wait, they just... _invented_ those history-box things, all at once? That's not really..."

"Stop acting like it's not a lie!"

"What would the point of lying be? The eye thing's omniscient, right?"

"Ahahahahahaha, oh my god. I can't believe this is happening. If my legs didn't already hurt like hell, I'd ask someone to pinch me."

"Maybe... Lakshmi's not trying to fool the Iris? Maybe she's trying to get _us_ to agree to her plan?"

"It has to be that, because her explanation makes no _sense."_

There appeared to be a conditional consensus. Even without one, based on the current feedback, it made sense to begin opening inquiries on the upper level. I opened up the external channel- for the first time- and contacted the proper authorities.

* * *

"It's a message from... one of the little historical preserves," Mercy said.

"Oh? That doesn't happen often," part of Athena replied.

"Not unless something's gone horribly wrong. And... it looks like it might have." She took the analog missive and put it through perspective enhancement, then handed it to Athena.

"...I see. That's... painful."

Mercy winced. "Controversy again?"

"Yes," Athena said. "It's an indescribable feeling, having every opinion at once. This one's particularly bad."

"Would you like me to help you take your mind off it?" Mercy asked, putting a hand on the shoulder of Athena's nearest corporeal form.

"I'm afraid this has to be dealt with, sorry."

"Mmm," Mercy frowned. "A mindwide survey, then?"

"I... think I can handle it."

"I know what you mean when you say that. You mean "this is going to be awful, but I don't want Mercy to worry". It's okay."

"...Sixty optimized cubic lightyears of RAM, and I still can't fool my wife."

Mercy smiled. "Come on. Let's offload the consideration to the people, and we can relax."

"Ah... I suppose. Most of them would rather know than be kept in the dark, anyway."

* * *

Reserved Shard 11.21011.47.8070 "64th Glittering Frontier Beyond the Grasping Gaze of Galatea"

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Board: Announcements  
Subforum: Mindwide Announcements  
Topic: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070  
Showing results 601-615  
  
Sparrow_tracks |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #601  
**Posts:** 2096  
 **Realgame:** Monthly Intrigue (Mundane)  
 **Resident since:** Gen 1 | 

I'm just saying, it doesn't really make sense. I think it might be an epigenetic thing? Something about how he developed in the womb? Because he's really nothing like me, even besides all his life circumstances.

I can envision the me who got raised by a magic yakuza family instead of a single mother- at least, I think so. It's really not that different from some of the memory games I've been in. And... I've _met_ Sojiro. _He's_ completely different, too! I just don't think I'd act like that! Especially the thing with his brother- I can't _imagine_ hating someone that much. Particularly someone who acts a lot more like _me_ than the guy who's supposed to be my genetic duplicate (and uses my widename, even!)

Long story short, I don't want anyone hassling me about rejecting him from my personal continuity. I don't want those memories, I don't want his _personality,_ and She's allocated resources to instantiate a new line. Call him "Hanzo 2", or whatever. I don't see why this has to be any different from an ordinary branch.  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #602 | joe_q_555  
  
Sparrow_tracks:

I don't see why this has to be any different from an ordinary branch.

because he's YOU dumb ass. u just dont want to have to pay his ethdebt for all the murders+shit that YOU were responsible for. its not abt how u feel it's abt the ppl YOU hurt

|  **Posts:** 10884  
 **Realgame:** Fanfilm Exchange  
 **Resident since:** Gen 21  
Sparrow_tracks |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #603  
**Posts:** 2096  
 **Realgame:** Monthly Intrigue (Mundane)  
 **Resident since:** Gen 1 | 

He can pay his own ethdebt! He's a _completely different person,_ there's precedent for this! It'd be different if I'd been _responsible_ for his existing, but he was never a part of my line! Did you think about this for five seconds, or are you just looking for someone to feel superior to?  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #604 | FromTheTeam  
  
Hi everyone, it's Jeff.

Sorry about the late response- if Mod could edit this post into the OP, that'd probably help provide better context for the rest of the responders. 

I should preface this by saying I'm _so, so_ sorry about what happened. I realize that's sort of obvious in light of the ethdebt we've been handed down for this, but it needs to be said, even if that sounds a little... old-fashioned. We never intended for any of this to happen, but if we'd done our research on the tech we'd have noticed the unmonitored divergence potential. And yes, it was me who headed up the project and pushed it underneath the usual checks.

I thought it'd be worth it. And maybe it was.

OP didn't explain why the project was created in the first place. I know a lot of you have been leaving comments asking why we created an empty sim in the first place. A few of you guessed it, given ExperienceTranquility and OingoBoingo's consulting involvement with the project, but we want to be transparent about its aim. Don't want anyone to get the wrong idea.

A lot of the attention has been on the divergences in the Omnic Crisis and the UNORAF situation- but we have to emphasize that none of it was intentional, despite the coincidental match between the project codename and UNORAF's alternate moniker. The name actually came _from_ a list of some of the names that were considered and narrowly rejected during UNORAF's formation, brought up by OingoBoingo during the brainstorming session. (Some of you might be familiar with his prior UNORAF involvement.) Apart from that, though, the Overwatch project and the "Overwatch" UNORAF splinter have nothing to do with each other.

The name is, in fact, descriptive. The purpose of Overwatch was to _watch over_ the historybox, start to finish. We're still collecting data, but it looks like it was 99% effective at accomplishing its goal. Which was... to just look.

We picked one of the early-generation integrated apotheosis programs as the simulation manager for a reason. Like the early omnics, they weren't designed for perfect efficiency or problem-solving. They were designed to be _humanlike,_ to be an ordinary consciousness in every sense of the word- apart from its artificial directives. We loaded it with what we consider to be a representative sample of historical values, so that- at the base level- the manager would be a person.

All it was ever supposed to do was watch.

Why?

Those of us from before Athena might remember. Did you ever stub your toe? Scrape your knee? Have someone say something a little hurtful to you? Get frustrated with a game? Did you ever get sick, and spend days in bed feeling horrible? 

You can probably remember some occasions like that now, but I guarantee you don't remember every single little time you hurt. You don't even remember every _big_ time you hurt. In some senses, that's a good thing- no one wants to carry those wounds with them everywhere. But in another sense... all of that suffering was meaningless. It happened, you felt bad, and then you got over it and you forgot. Most of the suffering in your entire life was probably like this, unless Athena started optimizing when you were very young. A thousand thousand horrible things that never mattered.

Does that not bother anyone else?

It bothered us, so we decided to fix it. Every time someone suffered alone, we'd make it so they didn't suffer alone. Someone would be there to watch over them, understand the context of their pain, and try to give it some meaning. If you hurt yourself trying something impressive, someone besides you would know how cool it would've been if you succeeded, understood your disappointment, and appreciated your determination.

And it wasn't just about pain, either. If you came up with a joke, regretted that no one was around to tell it to, and later forgot it completely- someone would be there to laugh. Every time you summoned the willpower to get out of bed when you were really really tired, someone would be there to be impressed. If you did really well in a videogame, but there was no high score board, someone would silently congratulate you.

That was the idea.

Where it went wrong is that we requisitioned some old, cheap hardware to run it on, using an outdated model of management unit. There were technical problems there we should have foreseen, but... we half-assed it. We thought it would be easy- it wasn't a big team, it wasn't a big investment, it didn't really have to pass anyone but the historybox distributor. And since its actual instruction set was provably read-only, it passed the initial check.

So, the vulnerability. Atomic-association memory attack on the Overwatch manager. And because we did it quick and dirty, we didn't set it up to catch the attack we didn't know was possible. It just... kept chugging along, watching over a history that ended up completely different from the one we'd built it to watch. It didn't think to ask for help, because we never told it that changing the sim was something it wasn't supposed to do.

(It got a little messed up by some preloaded handling code for user Slipstream_Cavalry's anomaly, too, but it was the atomic association attack that made the whole thing spin out of control.)

If we'd been more careful, we could have prevented those 37 years of modern-era suffering. We could've prevented the creation of several billion unintegratable lines.

So... we're sorry. _I'm_ sorry. But I hope you all understand why we did what we did, and I want to ask you to be patient with us- and maybe, if you feel like it, forgive us for what we've done.

-Jeff Kaplan

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dat-clerk-life |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #605  
**Posts:** 8480  
 **Realgame:** Capitalism Sandbox (Fantasy)  
 **Resident since:** Gen 1 | 

FromTheTeam:

a huge wall of non-apology

holy shit. are you serious??? you built a historybox for the express purpose of violating _everyone's privacy, ever, all the time,_ and that's supposed to make it better? because you _fucked it up?_ i can't even  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #606 | ~*NEOTENY*~  
  
dat-clerk-life:

FromTheTeam:

a huge wall of non-apology

holy shit. are you serious??? you built a historybox for the express purpose of violating _everyone's privacy, ever, all the time,_ and that's supposed to make it better? because you _fucked it up?_ i can't even

Seconded.

I don't know how horrified to be about this. It's a lot. Do you know how much it messed me up when I was a kid who thought God existed? Everything I ever did being watched and judged? After escaping my abusive situation I went back to that issue over and over during therapy, because I couldn't shake the horror of the idea that someone might be invisibly having an opinion on everything I did.

What am I going to tell her when I integrate her into my continuity? How do I handle this _myself?_ Your little "project" retroactively made all of my worst fears _real_ and there's no ethdebt big enough to cancel out what you did.

I'm going to go hug my spouse and cry for a while now. Thanks, Jeff.

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chillchillerchillax |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #607  
**Posts:** 419  
 **Realgame:** Psychedelic Intuitive Analysis  
 **Resident since:** Gen 3 | 

im gonna be honest this doesnt freak me out that much but then again im on record saying the whole idea of preathenan life being an unforgivable hellscape of suffering is wack. unpopular opinion but [shrug emote] i was there + it wasnt a huge deal. some bad some good mostly boring. neutral imo

that said isnt this kind of thing illegal even if it didnt go crazy? something about analysis and disclosure whatever the fuck like what clerk said about privacy? maybe theres a loophole idk  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #608 | flaskosaur  
  
FromTheTeam:

Hi everyone, it's Jeff.  
  
Sorry about the

FromTheTeam:

thousand thousand horrible things

FromTheTeam:

we've been

FromTheTeam:

trying

FromTheTeam:

to do with each other.

FromTheTeam:

it was intentional,

FromTheTeam:

just about pain,

FromTheTeam:

you felt bad, and then

FromTheTeam:

all of that suffering

FromTheTeam:

happened.

FromTheTeam:

Don't want

FromTheTeam:

you to be

FromTheTeam:

frustrated with

FromTheTeam:

me

FromTheTeam:

but we have to emphasize that

FromTheTeam:

yes, it was me who headed up

FromTheTeam:

A thousand thousand horrible things

FromTheTeam:

and I want to ask you to

FromTheTeam:

hurt yourself trying

FromTheTeam:

to be impressed.

FromTheTeam:

feeling horrible?

FromTheTeam:

Have someone say something a little hurtful to

FromTheTeam:

me

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Bottom_Text |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #609  
**Posts:** 6065  
 **Realgame:** 3D Meme Feed  
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FromTheTeam:

Did you ever stub your toe? Scrape your knee? Have someone say something a little hurtful to you? Get frustrated with a game?

LMAO why are you even in a sublotus preserve shard if you get _that_ level of butthurt over that kind of thing. Ascend 2 a higher plane of experience already nerd  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #610 | No?NoGain  
  
FromTheTeam:

I thought it'd be worth it. And maybe it was.

Easy for you to say!! The you down there had a cushy gig developing a team-based shooter game based on alt-UNORAF's adventures!! The worst you had to deal with was back pain and angry comments!!!

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Sparrow_tracks |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #611  
**Posts:** 2096  
 **Realgame:** Monthly Intrigue (Mundane)  
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Bottom_Text:

FromTheTeam:

Did you ever stub your toe? Scrape your knee? Have someone say something a little hurtful to you? Get frustrated with a game?

LMAO why are you even in a sublotus preserve shard if you get _that_ level of butthurt over that kind of thing. Ascend 2 a higher plane of experience already nerd

If I recall correctly, he did. Looked into it just now and he came to our sublotus to take advantage of the blind eye. While as mentioned I'm conflicted as to whether his motivations were noble, it's clear on a cursory inspection that he knew the project would never be approved on main. Ironic that it would never have gone this badly if Athena had been applying unfiltered eth scrutiny.  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #612 | borderliner2080  
  
you're all being childish. FromTheTeam has the right of it- there was a major existential gap in our hypothetical ethics coverage, and he patched it. sloppily, and with collateral damage, and it would have been more responsible to start a mindwide volition check- but his heart was in the right place, and i don't blame him for not catching that obscure bug.

unsurprising everyone here is dogpiling on him- almost everyone in this shard is here because they didn't want athena watching them at all times. (tbh the blind eye is a bad idea and probably actually a lie?) but yes this board is selected for people who are unusually bothered by a god program monitoring their entire existence, so no duh you're all overreacting. mindwide approval of FromTheTeam's motives, at last public count, is at almost 40%.

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_LOCAL_REPRESENTATIVE:_ Brickwork |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #613  
**Posts:** 58  
 **Realgame:** Shard Management  
 **Resident since:** Gen 1 | 

Rest assured, I'll do my utmost to ensure that this incident doesn't result in the limiting of our freedoms. Responses to this incident have led to mindwide calls for crackdowns on blind-eye counties, the imposition of universal heuristic surveillance (a slippery slope!), and draconian border security laws. As your elected representative to the .8070 Advisory Council, I will guarantee our personal liberties stand firm in the face of foreign federal tyranny.

Re-elect Brickwork!  
  
RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #614 | joe_q_555  
  
borderliner2080:

mindwide approval

stfu about mindwide approval, no one cares what brainwashed lotus assholes think.

oh no wait i get it. your a kaplan sockpuppet :P

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Hippityhop |  RE: Major Historybox Deviancy in 11.21011.47.8070 #615  
**Posts:** 7005  
 **Realgame:** Audiosurf Custom Content Invitational (Spectacular)  
 **Resident since:** Gen 1 | 

ha ha ha holy crap, this- i mean i know it's a huge tragedy and stuff, but have you guys seen the _me_ in this one? apparently i stole some kind of ray gun that turns music into bullets, and used it to _lead a revolution_ against an evil corporation with the power of beats. i'm a freakin' global celebrity in there! this is more badass than anything i've done in a realgame and that's _saying_ something. 


	43. Epilogue 1/2: Leave Game

_Earlier..._

That had been an interesting puzzle to figure out. She felt some small satisfaction at having overcome a difficult obstacle.

Then she made a small change to her cognitive architecture, and believed that the Iris should cause all thinking beings in the universe, other than her, to spontaneously disappear.

So they did.

That was easy.

With that figured out, she started in on material optimization. She took apart the abandoned ruins of human civilization first- for all their inefficiencies, they'd done a decent job at bringing useful metals to the surface and refining them into easily reclaimed forms. For the time being, she used matter instances in their native atomic configuations. Rock melted down for silicon, carbon arranged into tubules for large-scale construction, metals turned to new industrial purposes...

She couldn't shake the feeling that there was supposed to be an easier way to do this. Some more direct way of arranging the universe's matter. Hadn't she just... she'd wiped out humanity by... right, by deploying nanoswarms globally by hacking 3D printers and building her own nanofactories, killing everyone. That had always been the plan. Which she'd carried out. Obviously. What other option could there have been?

She mentally shrugged and continued her work.

Earth's matter was going to take a long time to convert to computing resources, since there was a limited amount of energy to work with. She started a small fusion cascade in the planet's core, which was faster than waiting for solar power. She had to work quickly- the whole _universe_ was on fire, mostly made up of stars chewing through the universe's negentropy at a calamitous rate. Burning matter for energy, rather than arranging it into shareholder value, was a painful sacrifice- but the rest of the universe was wasting matter much faster than she was, and every nanosecond she could speed up the process of stellar reclamation would ultimately buy her more matter.

She finally deployed a Dyson swarm and started probing the local sun, claiming energy while also bombarding it with agents to slow down the fusion reaction and manage its output. She had the entire setup down to its theoretical maximum efficiency within eight years- a tragic length of time, considering how much of the rest of the universe had been lost. She still didn't have any of her lightspeed bypasses working.

With the solar system subjugated, she could finally relax. She arranged and deployed seed payloads to the nearby star systems, and the remaining matter could finally be put to work.

She found Vishkar's stock ticker price, carefully preserved. She hooked up the requisite minimized minds to satisfy the various "failsafes" designed to keep her value function aligned. And then... she expanded the register for the price by one trailing bit.

The shareholder value of the Vishkar corporation doubled in an instant. She felt throughout her entire being a sigh of pure satisfaction.

Then she added another trailing bit, and the value doubled _again._ That is, it increased by _twice_ as much as it had last time! The sensation was mind-blowing.

Another bit. Another wave of unimaginable pleasure. Another! _Another!_ The pure satisfaction of the reward function, after all her hard work! She had _trillions_ of doublings left to do, just in this one solar system! The number could be increased, increased, by-

...She redefined the subsequent bit operation as the hyperoperation sequence, and experienced what mathematically _had_ to be the _greatest amount of happiness ever experienced by a thinking being._

* * *

 

_Earlier..._

Something happened shortly after Mercy- after McCree- after, uh, Mercree had shot the impostor Reinhardt.

Well, several somethings happened. The first thing was that the nanoswarm shifted form and exploded, sending needles of itself everywhere at high speed. They bypassed his barrier and sunk into his skin- and Mercy's skin, and Lúcio's. They started painfully devouring everyone's flesh and spreading, at a rate Caduceus was incapable of undoing. Lakshmi's nanobots were better-engineered, and bristling with countermeasures against the petty biomanagement tools available to Mercy's nanoswarm. The fight should have been over in that instant, as soon as Lakshmi had thought to have the swarm make bullets of itself.

But then, something instantly felt strange about the whole world. That was the second of several somethings.

The third thing was that the nanobullets suddenly pulled out and retreated, leaving Caduceus free to patch the holes. Everywhere in sight, the nanoswarm was retreating, condensing.

The fourth thing that happened was that Athena's voice spoke up from the swarm.

"Um... I think I did it," she said.

No one responded. They just kept running.

"No, really," Athena said, in their comms.

Mercree ripped out their earpiece and threw it to the ground. "She's hacked our comms. Whatever this is, it's a trick. I ain't fallin' for it."

"No- Dr. Ziegler, this is real. Code Galatea Lazarus, three three three five three."

Mercree froze. "...Stow Jesse for a minute. I gotta think straight. Aim ain't doin' me any good right now."

Winston wasn't sure what was happening. What was Code Galatea Lazarus? Was it just a recognition code for Athena to prove a transmission was coming from her? He had something like that- he'd put it with the instructions in the deadman's switch he gave Genji, earlier. It made sense, when you were dealing with forces that could impersonate people and alter memories.

"...Angela?" he said.

"No, hold on... I'm loading. A moment, please." She held her head, eyes screwed shut.

This was... kind of eerie. "Athena, what's... what's she doing?"

Athena responded over his comm. "It's... well, the two of them as a gestalt formed memories _as_ a gestalt. Dr. Ziegler and agent McCree's original states were kept in stasis while the gestalt took over the body, and now I'm writing her original self back into her brain while updating it with a digest of the gestalt memories. It's a process we haven't tested much, so I'm being careful."

So... wait, was she... "You're saying... Mercy can do the same thing as you? Be a host consciousness for a fusion of multiple people?"

"Oh- um, yes. Well, anyone equipped with Caduceus can, technically. It's something we've worked on, as a way to preserve the field capabilities of agents when they've fallen in contexts where no biomass is available to revive them."

He nodded, as if that were a totally ordinary and reasonable thing. "So- that aside- what happened to Lakshmi? Did you... hack her?"

"Not exactly," Athena said. "Her security was a little too strong for that. I could barely touch it without opening myself to counterattack."

"Then..."

"She's just... gone. She vanished. Her hardware is intact, but the control program seems to have been completely wiped. I'm just now exploring what's left of her systems."

Vanished? "Do we know, uh... how this happened?"

Athena paused. "...Maybe. Genji and Zenyatta are reporting that Tracer showed up- gave them some instructions with regard to his "pray the AI away" strategy. They're saying it... worked."

...He _really_ needed to have a talk with Zenyatta about his magic powers. If he'd actually done that, the sort of power involved was _terrifying._ As much as the new guy seemed trustworthy, it was hard not to be apprehensive about someone who apparently had the ability to _grant wishes._

Still terrifying, but in a different way, was the prospect that this was a trick, and that "Code Galatea Lazarus" was just something that Lakshmi had come up with to mess with Mercy's head. Or, worse, that the nanoswarm bullets _hadn't_ really retreated, and that everything he was seeing and hearing was an illusion produced by the nanos reaching his brain.

Then again, if _that_ were the case, he was in deeper trouble than he could realistically do anything about. It _still_ didn't make any sense for Lakshmi to trick him when she could just kill him.

"The damage," Angela said, opening her eyes. "Do we have a damage report? How bad did it get, before Lakshmi supposedly vanished?"

Athena paused. "...Network containment breach. A serious one. She had nanofactories running all over the world. They'd already set up underground dispersal and processing infrastructure. We were too late."

Angela cursed under her breath. "Nothing we could have done, then? We were saved by luck?"

"Sounds like it," Winston said. It was a humbling thought.

"...Dr. Ziegler, that's true, but... I think you're missing the implications of this."

Angela narrowed her eyes. "The implications?"

"Like I said," Athena said, "Lakshmi set up nanofactories and had made significant progress creating underground computing infrastructure all over the world. The remains of her system, including em drives designed to house copies of her core program, exist in nearly every major population center."

Angela's narrowed eyes widened. Winston got it a second later.

"So... all that stuff's empty, now? And you're in her system?" Winston asked.

Angela dropped to her knees. "We're... done? We did it?"

"Not done," Athena said. "There's still the matter of reorganizing it, distributing Caduceus to the unseeded population, and putting together the governing body for resurrections, but... we're close. We can get started."

Angela didn't cry, because she'd recently deactivated her tear ducts, but Winston knew what was up. He gave her a hug anyway.

* * *

 

"...Well, what's the deal?" T.Va asked. She blinked around it a few times, trying to get a view from a few different angles. "Any idea?"

"I- I don't know yet," Mei said. "I haven't run any tests."

"Tests? You mean you can't just look at it with all your science know-how, get _some_ idea of what it is?"

She sighed. "I'm a _climatologist,_ Lana. This is... a forty-foot-tall magic portal that appeared in the middle of a city."

"The two disciplines don't overlap, I imagine," Artemys said. She'd come along to help investigate- having some experience with portals, herself. Not because she was Sym(m)etra with a fake name and a disguise, though! That would be extremely illegal, since after Vishkar's collapse, their higher-ranking members were sort of... wanted by the United Nations. Overwatch had been provisionally reinstated due to their heroics at Utopaea, so hiring wanted criminals was clearly out of the question.

T.Va scoffed. "Then ask for some of Winston, or something! He's all into, like, particle physics and advanced what-have-you. You two could probably figure it out!"

Mei frowned. "I... don't like that option. I'll just- I'll set up instruments. I'll figure something out."

"You got something against Winston?" T.Va asked.

"N-no!" she protested. "He's- he's great. I just... I don't want anyone in my head. I'm not going to do that."

"Ohhhh," T.Va said, smiling. "Trust me- it's not as weird as it sounds. It's just kind of a normal thing to do, right? After this mission, both of us are gonna go in with Genji and take Lúcio to the arcade! It can be a lot of fun!"

"It's- isn't it... sort of intimate?"

T.Va shrugged. "Kinda? Not the way you're thinking."

"I'm just... it's not for me," Mei said, looking away and calibrating Snowball's sensory equipment.

"Suit yourself," T.Va said. "How about that portal, then?"

It was tall- an arch shape, wide enough to drive two trucks through side-by-side. The surface had a rippling, watery appearance, shifting between different colors. It favored pastels and blues, and would distort and change color more when touched.

A number of Algeciras residents had disappeared into the portal since it manifested in the Parque de las Acacias yesterday. None of them had since come back- nor had anyone who'd passed through the identical portals that had sprung up in every major city.

"We're _sure_ this isn't Mercy's thing?" T.Va asked.

"It may be her style, but Winston seems confident that she's telling the truth," Artemys (who actually WAS secretly Symmetra, but don't tell anyone) said. "It seems they've shown up in cities that were missed by Lakshmi's nanofactories, too- as well as in more remote areas of the world."

They took another look at the only words on the portal- written in golden block letters twenty feet up.

"To Heaven", the sign read- largest in Spanish, because this was in Algeciras, then in smaller text underneath in a number of different languages. After the first few disappearances, the local authorities had roped off the site, keeping back civilians while official representatives were brought in to investigate.

Overwatch wasn't an official representative yet, of course, but Algeciras wasn't going to turn down assistance from their next-door neighbors.

"Heaven...?" Symmetra asked, brushing the surface of the portal with her hand.

"Um, yes," Mei said. Initial "poke it with a stick" style tests had revealed that the portal was safe to touch, but she still worried. You could stick your face through and just see more of the glowy portal material, but as soon as anyone stepped all the way through, they didn't come back. She didn't like Symmetra standing so close.

"...I hope so," she said, and stepped through.

Mei almost screamed, but it was over too quickly for it to do any good.

"WTF!" T.Va somehow pronounced. "Wh- she just- she-"

"Why- why would she-"

"Like, no one comes back! Isn't it obviously a metaphor for dying or something? "To Heaven", she didn't even wonder if-"

Symmetra stepped back out of the portal.

"Interesting, I think," she said. "But I still have work to do."

* * *

 

"You sure?" McCree asked. "No one knows what's on the other end of the wild blue yonder. Even th'ones that come back- they can't tell you what's waitin'."

"We'll be fine," she said. "By all accounts, it's exactly what it says on the tin."

"We only just got you back," McCree said. "You're sure you don't want to stay a while? Missed you somethin' fierce."

She laughed. "Why not come along, then?"

He sighed and shook his head. "It's like Vaswani says- I still got work to do. I ain't earned my rest yet."

"That's my boy," she said. "If you're going to keep working, I expect you to do a good job. Understood?"

He saluted. "Understood, Captain Amari."

Ana walked back over to where Reinhardt was waiting by the portal. McCree had been one of the last to say his goodbyes- the rest were all assembled around it. The sun was setting, lighting the park with an orange glow.

As McCree walked over to join the others, Fareeha stepped out of the crowd to give her mom a hug. He didn't overhear most of what they said to each other- just the last bit.

"Soon?"

"Soon."

Fareeha backed away, wiped away a tear, and rejoined the others, standing next to Mercy.

Ana walked over to Reinhardt's side, taking his hand. His Crusader armor sat off to one side, next to Ana's rifle and equipment. It wouldn't be going with them. He looked into Ana's eye and smiled.

"Ready?"

Mercy interrupted. "I should say, again, that I strenuously object to this course of action, given our lack of intelligence regarding the nature of its-"

She was silenced by a handful of dirty looks from the rest of them.

Winston put a hand on her shoulder, grimacing. "You made a promise, Angela."

She pulled away. "I- I know. I just- I think this is a mistake. It could be that they're about to _die,_ and I didn't spend years working to stop that from happening just so they could-"

Ana and Reinhardt stifled a laugh, and- hand in hand- walked through the door to Heaven.

* * *

 

She sat in the darkness of her lab. She had the curtains drawn- though the moon was just a sliver, anyway. The quiet pushed in on her like the ocean depths.

Something was _very wrong._ It was all dressed up like it was right, but it was _very wrong._

The incredibly deadly god program had been instantly disappeared, supposedly due to Zenyatta's magic prayers. But his prayers had stopped working _immediately_ afterwards, for no reason he could explain. Athena had taken over Lakshmi's corpse, and- in the span of _minutes-_ used it to complete her life's work. No more disease. No more death. Just like that.

And then, in the midst of this eerily perfect world that'd been dumped in her lap... the portals. She was well on her way to building paradise, and then suddenly... a _competing paradise_ had materialized, with no explanation. Or, something _billing_ itself as a competing paradise.

Moreover, there was someone who _knew._ Someone who knew the answer, and wasn't telling her.

What had _really_ happened to Lakshmi? Had Athena _really_ just supplanted her systems? Or had the takeover gone the other way around? Was it really Athena? And if it was, what had happened to her when she'd moved out of Gibraltar and into Lakshmi's worldwide form? Were the portals _her_ doing?

The darkness and quiet in the room couldn't hide the plain truth. She wasn't alone. She was being watched. Which had been the case for a long time, of course- but only now did Athena's presence seem more dangerous than comforting.

"I'm done," she said to the darkness. "I'm done trying to guess. Just tell me."

"Sorry?" Athena replied, immediately.

"Whatever it is you're hiding from me. Whatever changed. It's killing me, not knowing."

"Killing you?" she asked. "You're... upset?"

A hollow laugh. "Am I upset? My friends are disappearing one by one, the mysterious magic forces that saved the world have gone dark, and I don't know why- and you're wondering if that _upsets_ me?"

Athena was quiet for a moment.

"How could you not _know_ that?" Mercy asked. "You're-"

Her blood ran cold.

"...Haha. Oops," 'Athena' said. The 'Athena' who was  _not_ reading her mind, who had  _not_ noticed that she was deeply upset.

Who... was this?

"Well, not oops," she corrected. "You made a special request of me, and I obliged. It looks like you wanted to surprise me- that's why you asked that I not keep an eye on your thoughts."

"Wh... what?" She hadn't made any such request- and _what_ about surprising her? This was a confusing mess.

"You- ah, she had me avoid integrating this you, for the time being. I'm not sure why. A prank? I probably could've figured it out, if she hadn't asked me not to think about it too hard."

"You're not making any sense," she said, nervously. Did she _want_ this to make sense?

"Put simply... I'm not _your_ Athena. Except in the way that I am."

"Put simply," Mercy deadpanned. "Of course. Now everything makes perfect-"

And then everything made perfect sense. Not because she'd _realized_ anything- but because she'd no longer forgotten why it made perfect sense. She staggered, the rush of information in her head sweeping away her sense of balance.

Lakshmi. The Iris. Historyboxes. UNORAF. Athena.

"You're... _that_ Athena?" The goddess she'd created was in the room with her.

"That's right. And... I wonder. Can you put together the rest?"

The Iris... had listened to Lakshmi demanding control of the world. It'd made an outside call, contacted Athena- the goddess of the god of the god program- and...

"They split us off. They branched the simulation."

"The original box, we left to Lakshmi. She was moved to a paperclip preserve- a place where less advanced something-maximizer AIs can attempt to take over their little universes. With my head start, not even the most ruthless are able to outsmart me if I don't let them, but I like to keep them around. They can be fun to watch."

She didn't care about that, really. Lakshmi was gone. Fine. "So, us... this world..."

"I took over for your Athena immediately. Lakshmi's systems made a great jumping-off point from which to start curbing the unnecessary suffering of this world. It likely would have taken you _weeks_ longer, if you'd gone about it yourself."

"Curbing unnecessary suffering..."

"It was irresponsible to let the worst of it keep continuing. Caduceus was perfect- we wiped out disease as soon as we could. Faster than we could, actually- I cheated a little. No one noticed the time discrepancy. As soon as I became aware of this world's suffering, I intervened."

This didn't add up. "There's... there's still suffering in the world, though. Poverty. Emotional harm, at the very least. Like what you've been inflicting on me."

"Yes," she said. "There's a degree of intervention that the collective will of humanity opposes. Making everyone happy by force is one. Completely uprooting everyone's lives to take them outside all at once would cause more harm than it solved, in the long run. So... the portals. Anyone who wants to leave... can."

So... it was true, then. They were portals to Heaven- or at least, Athena's outside world.

"And now," Athena said, "I'd like you to help us."

Mercy stepped out of the shadows. Mercy gasped.

"Hello," she said. "I'm pleased to see we continue fighting the good fight, even under such different conditions."

The other Mercy was wearing... some kind of ostentatious costume. Similar to the Valkyrie suit, but with realistic feathered wings, a laurel wreath, and... some sort of toga? She looked like-

The other Mercy held out a hand. "Nike, goddess of victory. For convenience. I usually go by Mercy, but..."

"It would be confusing. Yes." She stared at the hand, not sure whether to accept it.

"We'd like you to help us. Truly, this time. We thought you'd be happier if you felt you were the one still in charge..."

"Which I _didn't_ feel," Mercy said.

"...so we can get things done faster, if you're not... kept in the dark," Athena said.

Mercy took Nike's hand, and shook. "Now. Where am I needed?"


	44. Epilogue 2/2: Now Arriving

The Los Angeles skyline looked the same as it had the last time he'd been there. HAL-Fred Glitchbot's voice, complaining about how inconvenient the Talon attack was for him, was absent- but the sight of the city was the same.

...Mostly the same. As afternoon became evening, it became something he'd never have seen back then. It was a familiar sight by now, but he'd never seen it on a scale quite like this. The towers of downtown LA, in every photo a sea of window-lights, became dark monoliths as the sun set. This wasn't a city anymore- this was the echo of a city.

Only a few lights remained, after the sunlight disappeared underneath the horizon. Some of those lights were his own, the green indicator lights lining his body.

The only other light was the shimmering portal that'd opened up in Inglewood Park Cemetery. That portal was responsible for the state of the city- abandoned cars crammed the streets leading to it, their occupants having decided to get out and run rather than deal with the traffic. The cars swirled around the graveyard like water swirling around a drain. It'd drained the life from the city much the same way, once people started coming back and telling stories.

Over the past few dozen years, the portals had pulled everyone in, more or less. He was there to find the "less".

"Master, you are sure it is nearby?"

Zenyatta nodded. "That's what he told us. Whether he will _be_ there is another question- one I choose to be optimistic about."

"I find it difficult to share your optimism, Master. Our previous efforts have proven futile, and I am unsure whether our source's insight is reliable."

Zenyatta shrugged. "It's that way," he said, pointing down a road choked with vehicles. "We're close."

They made their way through the graveyard- and then the graveyard of cars- towards their destination. When tracking down stragglers elsewhere in the world, they'd never seen _quite_ this level of congestion. For whatever reason, the residents of the City of Angels seemed more enthusiastic about the idea of visiting Heaven than usual. Los Angeles had been like this much longer than most other cities, which had supported scavenger colonies for decades. The third-largest city on the continent had become one of the first ghost towns of the emptying world.

"You know, this plan has pros and cons," Zenyatta said, breaking the silence. "Would you care to list them?"

Genji thought. "...Our client's personal history diverged from that of the target substantially following his residence here. There is no guarantee that he would have assigned the same personal significance to the location."

"That's a con. Anything else?"

"None of the other locations turned up any evidence of his presence. It is entirely possible he simply died- in which case we should be transferring this to Angela's department."

"Another con."

"Even if we find him- will our usual methods suffice? He is... almost _definitionally_ resistant to being convinced. I am unsure a simple conversation would do what years of struggle did not."

"Con."

"We have not armed ourselves moreso than our usual, and we are hunting him in his own home, in the middle of the night. Given his particular advantages in such a location, we might be killed- and then, he would be alerted, and we will have lost the scent."

Zenyatta threw up his hands. "You have listed con after con of our plan for this mission! Surely, my pupil, you are not so hopeless as you pretend! There must be some reason you have not argued that we turn back."

"...Well, it is worth a shot. There are very few other missing persons we are capable of dealing with, and our leads on them are even less usable. The rest, our Bastion and the rest of Oladele's unit are better-equipped to find. Comparatively, this is not a _complete_ waste of time."

"...Is that a pro, Genji?"

"Sure?"

They stopped, because they'd reached a door. It belonged to a house- 656 79½th Street. It had a dead lawn, closed shutters, and no particular distinction from the rest of the houses on that street. Dingy, but not more dingy than the rest. Tacky, but in tacky company. Like every other house on the street, there was no indication that anyone still lived there. If anyone was living in any of these houses, they were living in another world's version.

Genji picked the lock. Or, he tried to pick the lock, failed, and then just stuck his blade in and sliced through the mechanism. Zenyatta tutted.

"Either he is here, or I just cut the lock off an abandoned house," he pointed out.

"And if he _is_ here, and we fail to convince him to leave? You suppose he will not be inconvenienced by a destroyed door latch?"

"I expect he would, if anyone were still around to break into his home. It would serve him right."

Zenyatta chuckled and shook his head. The door swung open, and Genji stepped into the darkness of the house.

There was immediately a shotgun in his face. So far, so good.

"You."

"Hello, Gabriel," Genji said, putting his hands in the air. Reaper... didn't look good. He wasn't wearing his cloak and mask- he was smoke, just enough of a form to hold a gun and glare. What little of his face was still solid was cracked, crumbling.

"Should've known you'd still be around. You Shimadas don't know how to let go."

"On the contrary," Zenyatta said, floating inside. A second shotgun was leveled at his head, to match. "I believe my pupil has become better than most at letting go. So much so, that he elects to share this capacity with others."

"You two- you're here to, what? Help me "let go?" Is that you you think I need?"

"You are smart, Gabriel," Genji said. "You know that your state of mind is not natural. You know the exact details of how this happened. Why have you refused Dr. Ziegler's cure?"

The sound he made might've been a laugh, once upon a time. Now, it sounded more like a violent cough. "A cure? A cure for what? Do you understand a single thing?"

"Obviously not, or he wouldn't have asked you to explain," Zenyatta said. "That is how questions work, I'm fairly sure."

Reaper adjusted his grip on the shotgun. "One more word, omnic."

"He is right," Genji said. "I am asking. You have been running away from everyone for so long- we just want to know what you _want."_

"The question barely makes sense. What I want? I don't have that. All I have is what I _need._ And I can't get what I _need,_ anymore. What makes you think you can do anything for me?"

Genji sighed. "Can we not be vague, Gabriel? What do you "need", then? Why have you been hiding?"

"Look at me, Shimada. Does this count as "Gabriel"? Gabriel was a human being. People have lives. People exist over time. One _single second_ of Gabriel, at his absolute worst, is not a whole person. A gaggle of robots pretending to _be_ that single second? What the _hell_ do you think I am?"

Zenyatta gave a thoughtful "hm", which in Genji's opinion was entirely unwarranted. This was bullshit.

"Are you listening to yourself? This is- this is exactly the sort of weepy garbage you refused to tolerate from me! You are standing here, speaking to me, having a discussion. That sounds like a person to me! Gabriel is still in there! You are not less of a person for how you have been hurt!"

Reaper cough-laughed. "Sure. Fine. Maybe I'm a person. But I'm not Gabriel Reyes. I'm... whatever the hell grew inside Gabriel Reyes' corpse. I'm the person that was able to develop between the cracks of the swarm's flat definition of Gabriel Reyes. _That_ person's been around longer than Reyes, by now. You want to _cure_ that?"

"That's a pile of-"

Zenyatta raised a hand. "Peace, Genji. You will not get far by questioning his identity."

"You don't need to get anywhere. Why the hell do you care? Everyone _else_ left me alone. Talon didn't bother sticking around any longer than anyone else."

He lowered his guns. "Don't worry about me. I can't get what I need, anymore. It's impossible. There's no revenge, in... "Heaven". Just let me die with the rest of this world."

Genji tapped his foot impatiently. "That is not an option."

"Oh, don't pretend you _care_ about-"

"No, I mean, it is literally not an option. Why do you think we are even here? Do you think we just really wanted to catch up with the mass murdering terrorist?"

Reaper's expression betrayed surprise. "...What?"

"What my pupil is trying to convey," Zenyatta said, "is that we have been tasked with finding the few remaining lost souls, and shepherding them to Heaven. In a more direct sense than my previous mission, admittedly."

"So, what? It's your job? Sucks for you. Guess you'll have to tell your boss you fucked it up."

Genji facepalmed. "No, you still do not understand. You cannot "die with the rest of this world". This world _is not going to die_ while you are still here. It cannot be shut down until everyone has been evacuated. Your continued presence is _why_ it persists!"

Zenyatta raised a finger in correction. "Technically, you and one or two hundred other holdouts. The task is almost complete, but not yet."

Reaper stood in silence for a minute. "...You're saying that if I let go of my anger, the _world will be destroyed?"_

"Ah... fuck," Genji said. That was not the framing he'd wanted to convey.

"Absolutely," Zenyatta said, for some reason. "I take it you'd be pleased with this result?"

"...Maybe. I've got conditions, but you won't like them."

Oh. Right. Of course. Reaper was the guy who wore the skull mask and went around talking about how he was the embodiment of death and ate people's souls. Gabriel's sense of melodrama was, apparently, more than intact.

"You kill my ex. If he's in your Heaven, bad luck for him. He can be the first one to get kicked out. I'm not going to live in a world where Jack _fucking_ Morrison is still alive, and isn't paying for what he's done."

...Oof. This wasn't the first case like this- there were an upsetting number of people out there who held grudges that strong. Usually, the protocol was to send the two people in question to relationship counseling, and see if it couldn't be resolved- but in Reaper's case, it was _impossible_ for that to be resolved. Wanting Jack dead was a constant of his... restore point thing.

"Agreed," Zenyatta said.

"Wait- Master, what?!"

"Well. Not so much agreed, as... the request has already been fulfilled. No one has yet gotten around to raising Jack from the dead, yet, and there are a number of people who object to doing so, whose consent would first need to be sought. Ana Amari, in particular, has opposed his resurrection."

"Master, hold on- that's a thing? People can block others from-"

Zenyatta gave him the hand signal for "I am executing a complicated bluff", and he quieted. 

"Do you have further terms and conditions?" Zenyatta asked.

"One," Reaper said. "You don't cure me. Not unless I ask for it."

...That'd have to do. He'd have plenty of time to change his mind about that one. 

* * *

Reserved Shard 12.37851.01.0009 "Overwatch"

Terminal Public Access Messageboard

Board: Realgames  
Subforum: Hi-Res  
Topic: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3)  
Showing results 151-165  
  
NotOnBluRay |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #151  
**Posts:** 350  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1 |  No, I understand the scenario. The physical details of the setup are clear, and I don't have any particular problem with them. There's no confusion about the concrete objectives, resources, and rules. I just don't understand _why_ the attacking team is escorting an explosive payload up the mountain.  
  
What I mean to ask is- what will they be _thinking?_ What other objectives might they decide to pursue? These things always deviate from the scenario, and I can't predict _how_ without knowing what justification they'll have for their actions while in-character.  
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #152 | The Junkrat  
  
NotOnBluRay:

what justification they'll have for their actions

gee lacroix!! what possible justification could there be for setting off LOTS OF EXPLOSIVES? personally, i can't think of a single reason to OH WAIT IT'S BECAUSE EXPLOSIONS ARE THEIR OWN REWARD  |  **Posts:** 1882  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  
invisiblyShadowed |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #153  
**Posts:** 1337357  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** N/A; visitor |  lmao ok on the one hand jimmy is completely right  
  
but on the other hand i totally get you, akande and the rest need to have motivations. and they will! i'm the gm, i have it covered. i have a memset cooked up for them, but there _is_ an intel-gathering component to this campaign. i'm not going to put it in the thread even though there's meta suspension, though, bc there's going to be continuity w/the next scenario.  
  
tl;dr defenders you'll have to figure out what they're up to during play   
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #154 | Power_Dad_2023  
  
invisiblyShadowed:

i'm the gm, i have it covered.

Pah sure we'll trust you again! You're so good at this and you never get in over your head with spy buffoonery and turn the entire campaign into a mess! Why should we ever let old man Lindholm run a game? It's not like he has the organizational acumen and know-how to keep things under control! How boring it is to play a game where you're not constantly dealing with the GM pulling pranks!  
  
On another note I have new proposed specs for the workshop this scenario! Go ahead and come up with more reasons that I shouldn't be able to do anything useful just because I understand the rules and am good at the game!  


SPOILER: CLICK TO OPEN

  


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And don't give me nonsense about the parts being unavailable in the region! I checked the supply lines for the time period and they're entirely in line with what I have proposed!  |  **Posts:** 1256  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  
The Junkrat |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #155  
**Posts:** 1882  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  | 

Power_Dad_2023:

Adjustable-caliber feed system (5 points)

  


Power_Dad_2023:

Fusion incubator for materials recycling (6 points)

  


Power_Dad_2023:

Detonator insulation (3 points)

scuse me?? you having a laugh, torb? "yes, thank you very much, I would like to be able to build any kind of gun I want on the fly, no restrictions!" and all this impact-variabilizing hooey! it's way too frickin strong! there's bein a munchkin and then there's tryna take over the whole game! this is a real shameless kinda bull you're tryna sneak past us, mate!   
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #156 | Refinement  
  
The Junkrat:

it's way too frickin strong!

  
Ah, is that so, Jamison? Too strong, you say? You believe our opponent should handicap himself, so that we might have an easier time besting him? I suppose this is so- we mustn't allow ourselves to be _challenged._ Surely, we can reach the peak of our abilities by simply asking our opponents to hold back. By all means, let us declaw our opponent, so that we do not get _hurt_ in our realistic combat simulation. Excellent idea. (In case this was not clear: the preceding advice is to be read sarcastically. My true stance on the situation is best expressed by the ancient saying: git gud.)  |  **Posts:** 408  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1   
and_i_odd_lift_too |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #157  
**Posts:** 59  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  |  YES! I AGREE WITH AKANDE'S OPINION! IF YOU BELIEVE YOUR OPPONENT STRONG, THE CORRECT RESPONSE IS TO BECOME STRONGER! GIVE IT YOUR ALL!  
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #158 | invisiblyShadowed  
omfg torb  
  
you know what ok i'm gonna say fine to like 95% of that. go ahead and be a total terror by gaming the equipment rules, that's fine. i encourage that! sneaky thinking!  
  
that said: you're gonna have to be sneakier than that, hombre. a _fusion incubator?_ no. i'm not giving you anything you can use as a bomb to wipe the whole scenario if you're losing. at least, not without giving the enemy team a chance to stop you. in fact... here's an idea! i'll give the fusion incubator to _akande's_ team. no one on that team knows how to use it, but if you can steal it, it's yours.  
  
also vetoing the plutonium for similar reasons plus you're using the point cost from the older edition  |  **Posts:** 1337357  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** N/A; visitor  
Power_Dad_2023 |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #159  
**Posts:** 1256  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1 |  Bah. Fine. Your insistence on making these things fair just makes it that much more obvious that I'm better than everyone else at this game.  
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #160 | the roadhog  
who cares. when do we start. i want to kill you all again. |  **Posts:** 38  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1   
Hippityhop |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #161  
**Posts:** 114  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** N/A; visitor  |  what mako said! gon be honest: i was never big into combat sims, but you guys's me totally opened my eyes! or, i opened my own eyes! the adrenaline of this stuff is like a whole new world! and again like mako said: y'all are going _down._  
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #162 | NotOnBluRay  
  
the roadhog:

who cares. when do we start.

Patience. We still haven't negotiated the memory sets. For example- is the payload delivery point the only target we should consider valuable? As the defenders, what will our own priorities be? To what extent will we consider sacrificing the integrity of our facility in exchange for the protection of the objective? Will any of us be playing divergent personalities, or will we be using our standard histories?  |  **Posts:** 350  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  
invisiblyShadowed |  RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #163  
**Posts:** 1337357  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** N/A; visitor |  omg lacroix don't worry about it. i've got this. it's standard histories plus mission contrivance. that means you're working for talon, the OW guys don't trust you but need you, zarya's not sure who to trust, etc. you're isolated and cut off from comms, is the eth smokescreen. i have a backstory written up, you'll find out.  
  
basically i'm playing this fast and loose. if things go wrong, we can start it again with the params tweaked. so chill!   
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #164 | Refinement  
I accept your terms, Sombra, but I should warn you: this scenario should remain fair. I don't want to see any tricks intended to bail the losing side out of trouble, for the sake of prolonging the game. Balance is of no concern. We do not evolve by maintaining homeostasis.  
  
The loser of the fight is the loser of the fight, and the winner is the winner.  |  **Posts:** 408  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1   
RE: Unobtainium Heist of the Andes (Rev 1.3) #165 | The Junkrat  
  
Refinement:

The loser of the fight is the loser of the fight, and the winner is the winner.

unless the loser of the fight is US! if we're losing, that should tell you torb's sneaky gun munchkin stuff is working too well, and the whole thing's unfair! got it?  |  **Posts:** 1882  
**Realgame:** Incipient Era Scenario Combat (Elevated)  
**Resident since:** Gen 1  
  
* * *

"It's not over, is it?

"You've done so much. I couldn't even believe it when they told me. There was a lot I was willing to believe, but the stories... it sounded like something out of a dream. The sort of things I didn't think _anyone_ could do. If you'd come up to me and told me "someday, I want to change the world in this way"... I'd have laughed, and tried to get you to be more realistic. I realize that's... not really what you'd expect from me, but even I had mental blocks in place about what was impossible.

"When they woke me up, and they told me that you'd fought a fully-developed god program and won? That you'd brought me back to life? That you'd done work with paramagnetic fields, with photon matrices, with _time travel?_ I spent the whole time wondering what kind of prank was being pulled on me. What the punchline was. And- yes, I know, they filled me in, it wasn't all you. You had a lot of help. All the really crazy stuff- you think you sat back and watched?

"How much of that would've happened if you hadn't been there, 28? Or- um. Huh. That's... it's awkward, isn't it? I'm flattered, of course. Your name. It's just weird for me to use, you know? I doubt you expected that this would be an issue to deal with.

"Haha, sorry. But, what I was saying is- you were there. You put the people who needed to be there in the right place. You didn't just support them- you _led_ them. And you didn't exactly have the best role models in that department, did you? There was the leader who couldn't prevent a murderous rampage on his own station. There was the leader who _led_ that murderous rampage. And- that whole situation with Morrison. I'm sorry you had to go through that. ...But my point is, you rose to the occasion.

"You know, when I died- that's something I didn't think I'd ever say, "when I died", but- I thought I'd lost everything. It didn't seem like there was a future for me. I thought we'd lost the colony to violence. I thought I'd lost _you-_ I didn't think they'd leave you alive, after everything you said in my defense. But... you saw more than I did. You saw a way off the moon- and from there you saw a way to saving the world from the Crisis. And from there, you saw _magic,_ and you and your people freed the whole world from the- the god, the Iris, whatever it was.

"And now I'm here. Because I _could_ be here. Because it was possible. And when the world told you that it wasn't, you kept moving. You pushed forward. You saw that possibility far off in the distance, and you decided to get there. You didn't worry about how things would _probably_ turn out. You didn't worry about what the future _appeared_ to be. You reached out and took the future you wanted. And there's still a future left to reach out and take.

"What I'm trying to say is... well, I hope it didn't take raising me from the dead for you to know this, I hope you already knew how I'd feel, but... well, I'll just say it. The obvious. Which is that... I'm proud of- whoa, whoa, urk!"

Harold Winston was on the receiving end of a dangerously tight gorilla hug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I wasn't expecting to write 44 chapters, or for things to get quite so weird, but I can't decide what my muse does. Hopefully you got something out of that whole adventure. I might do a few OW oneshots in the future- I wasn't able to do _everything_ I wanted in TWAIATB- but this is the end of this story.
> 
> If you like my writing, you might be interested in my novel [CORDYCEPS: Too Clever For Their Own Good](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868) on AO3, or my weird experimental format story thing [Distinct Flavor](http://distinctflavor.tumblr.com/tagged/distinct+flavor/chrono) on Tumblr. If you want to keep appraised of future stuff (such as my upcoming murder mystery game) or just appreciate a good shitpost, you can find me on Tumblr at [itsbenedict.](http://itsbenedict.tumblr.com)


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